Question

I need to get all the Django request headers. From what I’ve read, Django simply dumps everything into the request.META variable along with a lot of other data. What would be the best way to get all the headers that the client sent to my Django application?

I’m going use these to build a httplib request.

Answer 1

According to the documentation request.META is a “standard Python dictionary containing all available HTTP headers”. If you want to get all the headers you can simply iterate through the dictionary.

Which part of your code to do this depends on your exact requirement. Anyplace that has access to request should do.

Update

I need to access it in a Middleware class but when i iterate over it, I get a lot of values apart from HTTP headers.

From the documentation:

With the exception of CONTENT_LENGTH and CONTENT_TYPE, as given above, any HTTP headers in the request are converted to META keys by converting all characters to uppercase, replacing any hyphens with underscores and adding an HTTP_ prefix to the name.

(Emphasis added)

To get the HTTP headers alone, just filter by keys prefixed with HTTP_.

Update 2

could you show me how I could build a dictionary of headers by filtering out all the keys from the request.META variable which begin with a HTTP_ and strip out the leading HTTP_ part.

Sure. Here is one way to do it.

import re
regex = re.compile('^HTTP_')
dict((regex.sub('', header), value) for (header, value) 
       in request.META.items() if header.startswith('HTTP_'))