HTTP Headers, the Complete Toolkit 🧰

^{Object-oriented headers. Kind of structured headers.}

❓ Why

No matter if you are currently dealing with code using HTTP or IMAP (message, email), you should not worry about easily accessing and exploiting headers.

I have seen so many chunks of code trying to deal with these headers; often I saw this implementation:

# No more of that!
charset = headers['Content-Type'].split(';')[-1].split('=')[-1].replace('"', '')

Scroll down and see how you could do it from now on.

🔪 Features

kiss-headers is a basic library that allow you to handle headers as objects.

• A backwards-compatible syntax using bracket style.
• Capability to alter headers using simple, human-readable operator notation + and -.
• Flexibility if headers are from an email or HTTP, use as you need with one library.
• Ability to parse any object and extract recognized headers from it, it also supports UTF-8 encoded headers.
• Offer an opinionated way to un/serialize headers.
• Fully type-annotated.
• Provide great auto-completion in Python interpreter or any capable IDE.
• No dependencies. Never will be.
• 90% test coverage.

Plus all the features that you would expect from handling headers...

• Properties syntax for headers and attribute in a header.
• Supports headers and attributes OneToOne, OneToMany and ManySquashedIntoOne.
• Capable of parsing bytes, fp, str, dict, email.Message, requests.Response, httpx._models.Response and urllib3.HTTPResponse.
• Automatically unquote and unfold the value of an attribute when retrieving it.
• Keep headers and attributes ordering.
• Case-insensitive with header name and attribute key.
• Character - equal _ in addition of above feature.
• Any syntax you like, we like.

✨ Installation

Whatever you like, use pipenv or pip, it simply works. Requires Python 3.6+ installed.

pip install kiss-headers --upgrade

🍰 Usage

Quick start

parse_it() method takes bytes, str, fp, dict, email.Message or even a requests.Response or httpx._models.Response itself and returns a Headers object.

from requests import get
from kiss_headers import parse_it

response = get('https://www.google.fr')
headers = parse_it(response)

headers.content_type.charset  # output: ISO-8859-1
# Its the same as
headers["content-type"]["charset"]  # output: ISO-8859-1

Do not forget that headers are not OneToOne. One header can be repeated multiple times and attributes can have multiple values within the same header.

from kiss_headers import parse_it

my_cookies = """set-cookie: 1P_JAR=2020-03-16-21; expires=Wed, 15-Apr-2020 21:27:31 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.fr; Secure; SameSite=none
set-cookie: CONSENT=WP.284b10; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2038 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.fr"""

headers = parse_it(my_cookies)

type(headers.set_cookie)  # output: list
headers.set_cookie[0].expires # output: Wed, 15-Apr-2020 21:27:31 GMT
headers.set_cookie[0]._1p_jar # output: 2020-03-16-21
headers.set_cookie[0]["1P_JAR"] # output: 2020-03-16-21

Since v2.1 you can transform an Header object to its target CustomHeader subclass to access more methods.

from kiss_headers import parse_it, get_polymorphic, SetCookie

my_cookies = """set-cookie: 1P_JAR=2020-03-16-21; expires=Wed, 15-Apr-2020 21:27:31 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.fr; Secure; SameSite=none
set-cookie: CONSENT=WP.284b10; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2038 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.fr"""

headers = parse_it(my_cookies)

type(headers.set_cookie[0])  # output: Header

set_cookie = get_polymorphic(headers.set_cookie[0], SetCookie)

type(set_cookie)  # output: SetCookie

set_cookie.get_cookie_name()  # output: 1P_JAR
set_cookie.get_expire()  # output: datetime(...)

Just a note: Accessing a header that has the same name as a reserved keyword must be done this way :

headers = parse_it('From: Ousret; origin=www.github.com\nIS: 1\nWhile: Not-True')

# this flavour
headers.from_ # to access From, just add a single underscore to it
# or.. just using :
headers['from']

✍️Serialization

Since version 2.3.0 the package offer the possibility to un/serialize Headers.

from requests import get
from kiss_headers import parse_it, dumps

json_repr: str = dumps(
    parse_it(
        get("https://www.google.fr")
    ),
    indent=4
)

print(json_repr)  # See the result bellow

# Additionally, how to parse the JSON repr to Headers again
headers = parse_it(json_repr)  # Yes! that easy!

{
    "Date": [
        {
            "Tue, 02 Feb 2021 21:43:13 GMT": null
        }
    ],
    "Expires": [
        {
            "-1": null
        }
    ],
    "Cache-Control": [
        {
            "private": null
        },
        {
            "max-age": "0"
        }
    ],
    "Content-Type": [
        {
            "text/html": null,
            "charset": "ISO-8859-1"
        }
    ],
    "P3P": [
        {
            "CP": "This is not a P3P policy! See g.co/p3phelp for more info."
        }
    ],
    "Content-Encoding": [
        {
            "gzip": null
        }
    ],
    "Server": [
        {
            "gws": null
        }
    ],
    "X-XSS-Protection": [
        {
            "0": null
        }
    ],
    "X-Frame-Options": [
        {
            "SAMEORIGIN": null
        }
    ],
    "Set-Cookie": [
        {
            "NID": "208=D5XUqjrP9PNpiZu4laa_0xvy_IxBzQLtfxqeAqcPBgiY2y5sfSF51IFuXZnH0zDAF1KZ8x-0VsRyGOM0aStIzCUfdiPBOCxHSxUv39N0vwzku3aI2UkeRXhWw8-HWw5Ob41GB0PZi2coQsPM7ZEQ_fl9PlQ_ld1KrPA",
            "expires": "Wed, 04-Aug-2021 21:43:13 GMT",
            "path": "/",
            "domain": ".google.fr",
            "HttpOnly": null
        },
        {
            "CONSENT": "PENDING+880",
            "expires": "Fri, 01-Jan-2038 00:00:00 GMT",
            "path": "/",
            "domain": ".google.fr"
        }
    ],
    "Alt-Svc": [
        {
            "h3-29": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000"
        },
        {
            "h3-T051": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000"
        },
        {
            "h3-Q050": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000"
        },
        {
            "h3-Q046": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000"
        },
        {
            "h3-Q043": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000"
        },
        {
            "quic": ":443",
            "ma": "2592000",
            "v": "46,43"
        }
    ],
    "Transfer-Encoding": [
        {
            "chunked": null
        }
    ]
}

Alternatively you may use from kiss_headers import parse_it, encode, decode to transform Headers to dict (instead of JSON) or the other way around. Understand that the dict returned in encode will differ from the method to_dict() in Headers.

🛠️ Create headers from objects

Introduced in the version 2.0, kiss-headers now allow you to create headers with more than 40+ ready-to-use, fully documented, header objects.

1st example usage

from kiss_headers import Headers, Authorization
from requests import get

response = get("https://httpbin.org/bearer", headers=Headers(Authorization("Bearer", "qwerty")))
print(response.status_code)  # 200

2nd example usage

from kiss_headers import *

headers = (
    Host("developer.mozilla.org")
    + UserAgent(
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0"
    )
    + Accept("text/html")
    + Accept("application/xhtml+xml")
    + Accept("application/xml", qualifier=0.9)
    + Accept(qualifier=0.8)
    + AcceptLanguage("en-US")
    + AcceptLanguage("en", qualifier=0.5)
    + AcceptEncoding("gzip")
    + AcceptEncoding("deflate")
    + AcceptEncoding("br")
    + Referer("https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html")
    + Connection(should_keep_alive=True)
    + UpgradeInsecureRequests()
    + IfModifiedSince("Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT")
    + IfNoneMatch("c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a")
    + CacheControl(max_age=0)
)

raw_headers = str(headers)

raw_headers now retain the following :

Host: developer.mozilla.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
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, br
Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT
If-None-Match: "c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a"
Cache-Control: max-age="0"

See the complete list of available header class in the full documentation. Also, you can create your own custom header object using the class kiss_headers.CustomHeader.

📜 Documentation

See the full documentation for advanced usages : www.kiss-headers.tech

👤 Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are very much welcome.
Feel free to check issues page if you want to contribute.

Firstly, after getting your own local copy, run ./scripts/install to initialize your virtual environment. Then run ./scripts/check before you commit, make sure everything is still working.

Remember to keep it sweet and simple when contributing to this project.

📝 License

Copyright © 2020 Ahmed TAHRI @Ousret.
This project is MIT licensed.