Question

I am looking to put together a website that displays the full HTTP Request Headers and HTTP Response Headers for the loading of the page itself. For instance. If someone browses to http://example.com/index.php , I want the following to display:

HTTP Request

GET /index.php HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2011 10:20:46 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Content-Length: 1169
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

We were able to get the Request header to display fairly simply using the following PHP code:

print $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']." ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']." ".$_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL']."<br>";
foreach (apache_request_headers() as $name => $value)
        echo "$name: $value<br>";

But are having some difficulties with the HTTP Response header. Anyone have any ideas of how we can do this? It does not have to be PHP if you have a method that works in Perle or CGI or whatever.

To be clear, I don’t mean to set the HTTP Response to anything specific, only display the response served by the web server to load the page.

Answer 1

Well here is the issue, the response header is generated after the PHP (or any server-side language for that matter) has already completed its job.

To put it in english its like the post man handing you a letter and you asking him to explain how the process of handing you the letter went. He will probably just look at you dumb.

You will need a client-side language (ie. JavaScript) to perform this task.