ruby and net/http request without content-type

Question

I'm trying to make a call to a Tika server using Net::HTTP::Put. The issue is that the call always passes the Content-Type, which keeps Tika from running the detectors (which I want) and then chokes due to the default Content-Type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Tika docs suggest to not use that.

So, I have the following:

require 'net/http'
port = 9998
host = "localhost"
path = "/meta"

req = Net::HTTP::Put.new(path)
req.body_stream = File.open(file_name)
req['Transfer-Encoding'] = 'chunked'
req['Accept'] = 'application/json'
response = Net::HTTP.new(host, port).start { |http|
    http.request(req)
}

I tried adding req.delete('content-type') and setting initheaders = {} in various ways, but the default content-type keeps getting sent.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated, since I would rather avoid having to make multiple curl calls ... is there any way to suppress the sending of that default header?

Answer 1

If you set req['Content-Type'] = nil then Net::HTTP will set it to the default of 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded', but if you set it to a blank string Net::HTTP leaves it alone:

req['Content-Type'] = ''

Tika should see that as an invalid type and enable the detectors.