Internet Robot

[Steve Atkins]

On 10 Apr 1999 19:53:18 -0500, David Steuber
<trashcan at david-steuber.com> wrote:

>gscot at my-dejanews.com writes:

>-> You mentioned that it might be helpful to capture and look at the client's
>-> out put. How do I do that.
>
>This can be tricky.  Idealy, when talking to the server, you want an
>HTTP client that will show you all the headers.  When talking to the
>client, you want the server to display all the headers (or send them
>back to the client).  I've always done this the hardway.  You can

netcat, 'nc', can be a very handy tool for client debugging. You can
easily setup a microserver that'll dump requests from the client to
the console. It's a standard networking swiss-army tool - it shouldn't
be too hard to find the source code on the 'net (it has versions for
*nix and windows).

>actually talk to an HTTP server with telnet if you are desperate
>enough.  I don't recomend it because one typo and you have to do the
>request over again.

http://samspade.org/t/safe.cgi is a web based http client that shows
the whole transaction. Handy for initial debugging of servers, and
less painful than telnet.

>Other people responding mentioned a url package for python.  I would
>take a look at that to see just what it can do.  It may make the job a 
>lot easier.

Seconded.

Cheers,
  Steve
-- 
-- Steve Atkins -- steve at blighty.com