How to visualize the body part of a BaseHTTPRequestHandler

Question

I'm writing a server in Python and I want to send some data in the body part of a GET request. Currently when I run my code it just freezes.

I tried to put it in a try/except and read details about the instance variable rfile but I didn't find anything helpful

Client-side :

import http.client
import sys  
import os

#get http server ip  
http_server = sys.argv[1]  
#create a connection  
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection(http_server)  

while 1:  
  cmd = input('input command (ex. GET index.html): ')  
  cmd = cmd.split()  

  f = open('data.txt')

  if cmd[0] == 'exit': #tipe exit to end it  
    break  

  #request command to server  
  conn.request(cmd[0],'',f.read())  

  #get response from server  
  rsp = conn.getresponse()  

  #print server response and data  
  print(rsp.status, rsp.reason)  
  data_received = rsp.read()  
  print(data_received)  

Server-side :

from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler,HTTPServer
import os

class TestHTTPRequestHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
    def do_GET(self):
        a = ''
        fichier = open("data2.txt", "w")
        try:
            fichier.write(self.rfile.read())
        except:

        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header('Content-type','text-html')
        self.end_headers()
        return


def run():
    print('http server is starting...')
    server_address = ('127.0.0.1',80)
    httpd = HTTPServer(server_address, PancakeHTTPRequestHandler)
    print('htttp server is running...')
    httpd.serve_forever()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run()  

I expect being able to write my data from my GET request in my data2.txt file.

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

It freezes because of the self.rfile.read() in your server.py. The read method expect either EOF or a byte length to read. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/io.html#io.BufferedIOBase.read You're trying to log the client requests made to the server, a quick work around would be to pass the content length of the request to the read method with int(self.headers.get('Content-Length'))

In the end it gives us:

client.py

import http.client
import sys  
import os

#get http server ip  
http_server = sys.argv[1]  
#create a connection  
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection(http_server)  

while 1:  
  cmd = input('input command (ex. GET index.html): ')  
  cmd = cmd.split()

  f = open('data.txt')

  if cmd[0] == 'exit': #tipe exit to end it  
    break  

  #request command to server  
  conn.request(cmd[0], '', f.read())  

  #get response from server  
  rsp = conn.getresponse()  

  #print server response and data  
  print(rsp.status, rsp.reason)  
  data_received = rsp.read()  
  print(data_received)  

server.py

from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler,HTTPServer
import os

class TestHTTPRequestHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
    def do_GET(self):
        a = ''
        fichier = open("data2.txt", "a")
        try:
            content_length = int(self.headers.get('Content-Length'))
            response_str = self.rfile.read(content_length)
            fichier.write(response_str.decode('utf-8'))
            self.send_response(200)
            self.send_header("Content-type", "text/html")
            self.end_headers()
        except:
            self.send_response(200)
            self.send_header('Content-type','text-html')
            self.end_headers()
        fichier.close()
        return


def run():
    print('http server is starting...')
    server_address = ('127.0.0.1',80)
    httpd = HTTPServer(server_address, TestHTTPRequestHandler)
    print('htttp server is running...')
    httpd.serve_forever()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run()  

ps. I don't know what PancakeHTTPRequestHandler was so I replaced it with TestHTTPRequestHandler. And I also added a response in try except on the server side so that the the client gets a response otherwise it will crash.