Parsing HTTP Headers

Question

I've had a new found interest in building a small, efficient web server in C and have had some trouble parsing POST methods from the HTTP Header. Would anyone have any advice as to how to handle retrieving the name/value pairs from the "posted" data?

POST /test HTTP/1.1
Host: test-domain.com:7017
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://test-domain.com:7017/index.html
Cookie: __utma=43166241.217413299.1220726314.1221171690.1221200181.16; __utmz=43166241.1220726314.1.1.utmccn=(direct)|utmcsr=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 25

field1=asfd&field2=a3f3f3
// ^-this

I see no tangible way to retrieve the bottom line as a whole and ensure that it works every time. I'm not a fan of hard-coding in anything.

Answer 1

You can retrieve the name/value pairs by searching for newline newline or more specifically \r\n\r\n (after this, the body of the message will start).

Then you can simply split the list by the &, and then split each of those returned strings between the = for name/value pairs.

See the HTTP 1.1 RFC.