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resthttpheaderdelimiter

Http Headers as String: Which delimiter to use?

If I am getting a bunch of HTTP headers as a single string, what is the best delimiter to use to separate each header name/value(s) pair? I have though of using commas but they seem to occur within the value of certain HTTP headers. Is there any character that is not allowed for HTTP headers that I can use ?

Solution

  • One straightforward choice would be to use the same delimiter used by HTTP messages themselves. The grammar for messages can be found in RFC 7230 Section 3:

         HTTP-message   = start-line
                      *( header-field CRLF )
                      CRLF
                      [ message-body ]

    where CRLF is defined as a carriage return followed by a line feed.

    So my suggestion is to use that.