How to send an HTTP request using Telnet

Question

How to get a web page s content using Telnet   For example  the content of https   stackoverflow com questions

User · Answer

For posterity  your question was how to send an http request to https   stackoverflow com questions  The real answer is  you cannot with telnet  cause this is an https-only reachable url   So  you might want to use openssl instead of telnet  like this for instance    openssl s client -connect stackoverflow com 443     --- GET  questions HTTP 1 1 Host  stackoverflow com   This will give you the https response

User · Answer

To somewhat expand on earlier answers  there are a few complications   telnet is not particularly scriptable  you might prefer to use nc  aka netcat  instead  which handles non-terminal input and signals better   Also  unlike telnet  nc actually allows SSL  and so https instead of http traffic -- you need port 443 instead of port 80 then    There is a difference between HTTP 1 0 and 1 1   The recent version of the protocol requires the Host  header to be included in the request on a separate line after the POST or GET line  and to be followed by an empty line to mark the end of the request headers   The HTTP protocol requires carriage return   line feed line endings  Many servers are lenient about this  but some are not  You might want to use  printf    r n         GET  questions HTTP 1 1         Host  stackoverflow com             nc --ssl stackoverflow com 443   If you fall back to HTTP 1 0 you don t always need the Host  header  but many modern servers require the header anyway  if multiple sites are hosted on the same IP address  the server doesn t know from GET  foo HTTP 1 0 whether you mean http   site1 example com foo or http   site2 example net foo if those two sites are both hosted on the same server  in the absence of a Host  header  a HTTP 1 0 server might just default to a different site than the one you want  so you don t get the contents you wanted    The HTTPS protocol is identical to HTTP in these details  the only real difference is in how the session is set up initially

User · Answer

telnet ServerName 80     GET  index html        means  return   you need to hit return twice

User · Answer

You could do  telnet stackoverflow com 80   And then paste  GET  questions HTTP 1 0 Host  stackoverflow com     add the 2 empty lines above but not this one   Here is a transcript    telnet stackoverflow com 80 Trying 151 101 65 69    Connected to stackoverflow com  Escape character is       GET  questions HTTP 1 0 Host  stackoverflow com  HTTP 1 1 200 OK Content-Type  text html  charset utf-8

[web] How to send an HTTP request using Telnet

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