[Web-SIG] [client side] RFC 2616 HTTP header parsing, Digest auth, and cookies

[John J Lee]

First, Greg (Stein): do you intend to do the necessary work (whatever that
is -- ?)  to get httpx into Python 2.4?

There seem to be a whole bunch of functions around which all parse HTTP
headers like

foo=bar; spam="e g\"g;s,", another=header missing=semicolon, lonetoken; missingvalue=


Concatenated header values are separated by commas.  Optional semicolons
separate key/value pairs.  Values are optionally quoted.  Quoted values
may contain commas, semicolons and (\-quoted) quotes.  Values may be empty
(foo=) or missing (foo).  Not sure if this is defined formally somewhere
in RFC 2616.  I may have the details wrong.

Something like this is needed by both digest auth and cookie handling.
urllib2 defines (broken) functions to do this, and I think Anthony, Greg
S. and me all have functions to do this job.  I don't see why they can't
all be merged.

For cookies, a restricted version of the RFC 2616 format will do (I don't
need to worry about missing semicolons).  [I also need a weird function to
handle Netscape cookies, but that's another story.]

Do either of you have a function that you think will do most of this?

I have a rather liberal, not very beautiful, implementation that uses
regexps, ported from Perl.

I don't care much what gets used, as long as we don't end up with four or
five separate functions!


John