net/http: No easy way to get a server-side Request for testing.

[bcmills]

(net/http).Request is populated vastly differently on the client and server sides.
That's probably not fixable, given Go1 compatibility.

But it causes problems when testing http handlers - httptest.ResponseRecorder needs a Request to go with it, and the obvious candidate (http.NewRequest) generates the client-side version, not the server-side version.

You can get the server-side version by setting up an httptest.Server and making a request to it, but that involves a lot of boilerplate and some syscalls.

It would be nice if there were a way (in the http or httptest package) to get a Request in the server-side format without having to go through the whole HTTP stack with a real server.

[bradfitz]

I'm fine with this in net/http/httputil or net/http/httptest but not net/http, as we're trying to stop growing that.

API proposal? For simplicity of callers you might want this to return a single value instead of (*Request, error) but depending on what input you're imagining, returning an error might be inevitable.

[bradfitz]

Wait, isn't this just http://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#ReadRequest ?

[bcmills]

Maybe? For some reason I thought that ReadRequest generated a client-side request rather than a server-side one. Perhaps this is just a documentation issue.