parsing form parameters from raw http requests in java

Question

I'm trying to extract some information from raw HTTP Request messages (like the one below) and store them into instances of the org.apache.http.message.BasicHttpRequest (https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-core-ga/httpcore/apidocs/index.html) class.

I was able to employ org.apache.http.message.BasicLineParser class and its method parseHeader(String value, LineParser parser) to process (parse + store) the headers, but I don't know how to deal with the parameters passed with the form.

POST https://gist.github.com:443/gists HTTP/1.1
Host: gist.github.com
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en,fr;q=0.8,it-it;q=0.6,it;q=0.4,en-us;q=0.2
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: https://gist.github.com/
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=-------------------------10314229756379422411656878663
Content-Length: 1242

-----------------------------10314229756379422411656878663
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="parameter_name"

parameter_value

Do you know an utility which can parse the content starting after the header above (i.e. after the first empty line)? What I am interest in collecting are all the pairs <"parameter_name","parameter_value"> present in the request body.

I have already read similar answers/questions such as Parsing raw HTTP Request but I did not find anything helpful on the form-data component

Thanks in advance for your help and time

Answer 1

What you are seeing is MIME encoded content body. HttpClient is content agnostic and therefore does not provide a means of parsing such content. One can however use Apache Mime4J to do so.