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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T09:46:45+00:00

How can I view the full request headers, including post data , using libcurl

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How can I view the full request headers, including post data, using libcurl in php?

I am trying to simulate the post of a page, which when done from a browser and viewed in Live HTTP Headers looks like this:

https://###.com
POST /###/### HTTP/1.1
Host: ###.###.com
...snipped normal looking headers...
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------28001808731060
Content-Length: 697
-----------------------------28001808731060
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file_data"; filename="stats.csv"
Content-Type: text/csv
id,stats_id,scope_id,stat_begin,stat_end,value
61281,1,4,2011-01-01 00:00:00,2011-12-31 23:59:59,0
-----------------------------28001808731060
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="-save"
Submit
-----------------------------28001808731060--

So we nicely see the file I’m uploading, it’s content, everything’s there. But all my attempts at getting data out of cURL when I try to make the same post from php (using CURLOPT_VERBOSE, or CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT) show request headers that lack the post data, like so:

POST /###/### HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Host: ###.###.com
...snipped normal-looking headers...
Content-Length: 697
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----------------------------e90de36c15f5

Based on the Content-Length here, it appears things are going well, but it would really help my debugging efforts to be able to see the complete request. I am also irked that it is difficult, I should be able to see the whole thing; I know I must be missing something.

— EDIT —

What I’m looking for is the equivalent of this:

curl --trace-ascii debugdump.txt http://www.example.com/

which seems to be available with the option CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION in libcurl, but isn’t implemented in php. Boo.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are sending multipart/formdata. cURL basically shows the HTTP header completely I guess. The “problem” is that multipart/formdata consist of multiple parts. This is beyond “first level HTTP headers” and part of the body of the “main HTTP body”.

    I don’t know your environment, but you can debug using TCP traffic monitoring as well. For this, you can use Wireshark or tcpdump – Wireshark can as well show dump files created by tcpdump.

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