What's needed for a browser, Safari and Opera in particular to understand an HTTP response?

Question

I have an HTTP response of ``` HTTP/1.0 200 OK ... ``` Both Firefox and Chrome seem to understand it just fine and show the HTML content - however Safari and Opera just show me everything in plaintext. Adding a "Content-Type" field messes everything up for all browsers. What's the catch? I am not going to post the full code because there is a lot of arbitrary programming logic not related to the issue, however, what happens is something like this: I create a socket, then all the related socket operations occur - all this works like magic, then after all the processing I .send(' response here ') and for some reason it only shows on Firefox and Chrome. The response string looks like this: ``` ''' HTTP/1.1 200 OK ... ... ''' ``` This is what I am seeing: http://cl.ly/0y0U1s0G3X2v1C11282S

Accepted Answer

You state that you are sending a literal string like: ``` ''' HTTP/1.1 200 OK ... ''' ``` However, Python only adds a single ` ` corresponding to a newline in a triple-quoted string. So the bytes that are sent end up being ``` HTTP/1.1 200 OK ... ``` As you can see, there is a missing ` `. I suggest you use code like the following: ``` sock.send("HTTP/1.1 200 OK ") ``` In the above, you may want to add a `Content-type` header: ``` sock.send("HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-type: text/html ") ``` Then, after sending the header, send the document payload: ``` sock.send(''' ... ''') ``` This separates the protocol-level header from the data payload, and makes your code easier to understand. It's also easier to get the ` ` right in the header, since that's where it matters.

What's needed for a browser, Safari and Opera in particular to understand an HTTP response?

Solution

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