Header case-sensitivity?

[hartsock]

cookie = resp.getheader('Set-Cookie') versus cookie = resp.getheader('set-cookie')

My HTTP client library under python 2 used getheader('set-cookie') this returns None when using VCRpy. Practical testing seems to indicate that in production the getheader method is case insensitive.

Is this a bug?

[kevin1024]

Is this a bug?

Afraid not.

From RFC 2616 - "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", paragraph 4.2, "Message Headers":

Each header field consists of a name followed by a colon (":") and the field value. Field names are case-insensitive.

[kevin1024]

It occurs to me when rereading this I may have misunderstood your issue, in which case feel free to reopen with some code to reproduce the issue.

[hartsock]

I have a unique server that transmits set-cookie in all lower case as the header field, after doing some research, it looks like the bug is on the server not the client ... since the standard is Set-Cookie as described in documentation. I only notice this in test because some how the case gets fixed in VCRpy.

Edit:
The phrase set-cookie (all lower case) only occurs once in documentation rfc2109 ...

EDIT 2:
Note documentation....

Attributes (names) (attr) are case-insensitive. White space is
permitted between tokens. Note that while the above syntax
description shows value as optional, most attrs require them.

I think this means values such as set-cookie and Set-Cookie should be treated the same. This source thinks so tracing the source...

http/client.py#L755
headers.py#L90

It looks like at least one version of getheader may be case insensitive.

[kevin1024]

Yeah, VCR is treating headers as case-insensitive (in accordance with RFC2616) and is normalizing them (by lowercasing them) before storing them in the cassette. That's why it's "fixing" the problem for you.

[hartsock]

I wrote a test that's currently failing to illustrate why this might be an issue: hartsock@a86a3f7 ... I'm not 100% certain what the correct behavior should be in this circumstance but it looks like based on the headers.py#L90 reference above vcrpy might need to lower case the name used with getheader.

[kevin1024]

I think you're right. I'll try to look into it more this weekend, but I would like VCR to be as transparent as possible when patching out httplib, including the behavior of getheader().

On Aug 1, 2014, at 12:14 PM, Shawn Hartsock notifications@github.com wrote:

I wrote a test that's currently failing to illustrate why this might be an issue: hartsock/vcrpy@a86a3f7 ... I'm not 100% certain what the correct behavior should be in this circumstance but it looks like based on the headers.py#L90 reference above vcrpy might need to lower case the name used with getheader.

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