HTTP Message

Question

Hi there,
I am writing a program that is supposed to show a person all the step involved in sending an http request to a web server.
I was just wondering if there was a way that I could actually get the http request message initially sent through java.
For example, I am looking for a way to see this information from an http GET message:
GET /somedir/page.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
Connection: close
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0
Does anyone know if it's possible to represent this in java?

Answer 1

Something like this might work:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class DumpServer {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        ServerSocket serverSocket = null;
        try {
            serverSocket = new ServerSocket(4444);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Could not listen on port: 4444.");
            System.exit(1);
        Socket clientSocket = null;
        try {
            clientSocket = serverSocket.accept();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.err.println("Accept failed.");
            System.exit(1);
        PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(clientSocket.getOutputStream(), true);
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                    new InputStreamReader(
                    clientSocket.getInputStream()));
        String outputLine;
        char[] arin = new char[1024];
        while (true)
          int iread = in.read(arin);
          if (iread < 0) break;
          outputLine = new String(arin, 0, iread);
             System.out.println(outputLine);
        out.close();
        in.close();
        clientSocket.close();
        serverSocket.close();
}You connect to it with a browser with the URL "http://localhost:4444/".
It won't respond to the browser, just dump lines to standard out.
Edited by: sb4 on Mar 9, 2011 12:19 PM