When I submit a simple form like this with a file attached:
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="http://localhost:3000/upload?upload_progress_id=12344" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="100000" />
Choose a file to upload: <input name="uploadedfile" type="file" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload File" />
</form>
How does it send the file internally? Is the file sent as part of the HTTP body as data? In the headers of this request, I don't see anything related to the name of the file.
I just would like the know the internal workings of the HTTP when sending a file.
This question is related to
http
file-upload
In the given answers/examples the file is (most likely) uploaded with a HTML form or using the FormData API. The file is only a part of the data sent in the request, hence the multipart/form-data Content-Type header.
If you want to send the file as the only content then you can directly add it as the request body and you set the Content-Type header to the MIME type of the file you are sending. The file name can be added in the Content-Disposition header. You can upload like this:
var xmlHttpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
var file = ...file handle...
var fileName = ...file name...
var target = ...target...
var mimeType = ...mime type...
xmlHttpRequest.open('POST', target, true);
xmlHttpRequest.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', mimeType);
xmlHttpRequest.setRequestHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="' + fileName + '"');
xmlHttpRequest.send(file);
If you don't (want to) use forms and you are only interested in uploading one single file this is the easiest way to include your file in the request.
How does it send the file internally?
The format is called multipart/form-data, as asked at: What does enctype='multipart/form-data' mean?
I'm going to:
There are three possibilities for enctype:
x-www-urlencodedmultipart/form-data (spec points to RFC2388)text-plain. This is "not reliably interpretable by computer", so it should never be used in production, and we will not look further into it.Once you see an example of each method, it becomes obvious how they work, and when you should use each one.
You can produce examples using:
nc -l or an ECHO server: HTTP test server accepting GET/POST requestsSave the form to a minimal .html file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<title>upload</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="http://localhost:8000" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<p><input type="text" name="text1" value="text default">
<p><input type="text" name="text2" value="aωb">
<p><input type="file" name="file1">
<p><input type="file" name="file2">
<p><input type="file" name="file3">
<p><button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>
</body>
</html>
We set the default text value to aωb, which means a?b because ? is U+03C9, which are the bytes 61 CF 89 62 in UTF-8.
Create files to upload:
echo 'Content of a.txt.' > a.txt
echo '<!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title>' > a.html
# Binary file containing 4 bytes: 'a', 1, 2 and 'b'.
printf 'a\xCF\x89b' > binary
Run our little echo server:
while true; do printf '' | nc -l 8000 localhost; done
Open the HTML on your browser, select the files and click on submit and check the terminal.
nc prints the request received.
Tested on: Ubuntu 14.04.3, nc BSD 1.105, Firefox 40.
Firefox sent:
POST / HTTP/1.1
[[ Less interesting headers ... ]]
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Length: 834
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text1"
text default
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text2"
a?b
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="a.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain
Content of a.txt.
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file2"; filename="a.html"
Content-Type: text/html
<!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title>
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file3"; filename="binary"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
a?b
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150--
For the binary file and text field, the bytes 61 CF 89 62 (a?b in UTF-8) are sent literally. You could verify that with nc -l localhost 8000 | hd, which says that the bytes:
61 CF 89 62
were sent (61 == 'a' and 62 == 'b').
Therefore it is clear that:
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------735323031399963166993862150 sets the content type to multipart/form-data and says that the fields are separated by the given boundary string.
But note that the:
boundary=---------------------------735323031399963166993862150
has two less dadhes -- than the actual barrier
-----------------------------735323031399963166993862150
This is because the standard requires the boundary to start with two dashes --. The other dashes appear to be just how Firefox chose to implement the arbitrary boundary. RFC 7578 clearly mentions that those two leading dashes -- are required:
4.1. "Boundary" Parameter of multipart/form-data
As with other multipart types, the parts are delimited with a boundary delimiter, constructed using CRLF, "--", and the value of the "boundary" parameter.
every field gets some sub headers before its data: Content-Disposition: form-data;, the field name, the filename, followed by the data.
The server reads the data until the next boundary string. The browser must choose a boundary that will not appear in any of the fields, so this is why the boundary may vary between requests.
Because we have the unique boundary, no encoding of the data is necessary: binary data is sent as is.
TODO: what is the optimal boundary size (log(N) I bet), and name / running time of the algorithm that finds it? Asked at: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/39687/find-the-shortest-sequence-that-is-not-a-sub-sequence-of-a-set-of-sequences
Content-Type is automatically determined by the browser.
How it is determined exactly was asked at: How is mime type of an uploaded file determined by browser?
Now change the enctype to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, reload the browser, and resubmit.
Firefox sent:
POST / HTTP/1.1
[[ Less interesting headers ... ]]
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 51
text1=text+default&text2=a%CF%89b&file1=a.txt&file2=a.html&file3=binary
Clearly the file data was not sent, only the basenames. So this cannot be used for files.
As for the text field, we see that usual printable characters like a and b were sent in one byte, while non-printable ones like 0xCF and 0x89 took up 3 bytes each: %CF%89!
File uploads often contain lots of non-printable characters (e.g. images), while text forms almost never do.
From the examples we have seen that:
multipart/form-data: adds a few bytes of boundary overhead to the message, and must spend some time calculating it, but sends each byte in one byte.
application/x-www-form-urlencoded: has a single byte boundary per field (&), but adds a linear overhead factor of 3x for every non-printable character.
Therefore, even if we could send files with application/x-www-form-urlencoded, we wouldn't want to, because it is so inefficient.
But for printable characters found in text fields, it does not matter and generates less overhead, so we just use it.
I have this sample Java Code:
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
public class TestClass {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
ServerSocket socket = new ServerSocket(8081);
Socket accept = socket.accept();
InputStream inputStream = accept.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
char readChar;
while ((readChar = (char) inputStreamReader.read()) != -1) {
System.out.print(readChar);
}
inputStream.close();
accept.close();
System.exit(1);
}
}
and I have this test.html file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>File Upload!</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="http://localhost:8081" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="file" name="file" id="file">
<input type="submit">
</form>
</body>
</html>
and finally the file I will be using for testing purposes, named a.dat has the following content:
0x39 0x69 0x65
if you interpret the bytes above as ASCII or UTF-8 characters, they will actually will be representing:
9ie
So let 's run our Java Code, open up test.html in our favorite browser, upload a.dat and submit the form and see what our server receives:
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8081
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 196
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Origin: null
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.97 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundary06f6g54NVbSieT6y
DNT: 1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en,en-US;q=0.8,tr;q=0.6
Cookie: JSESSIONID=27D0A0637A0449CF65B3CB20F40048AF
------WebKitFormBoundary06f6g54NVbSieT6y
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; filename="a.dat"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
9ie
------WebKitFormBoundary06f6g54NVbSieT6y--
Well I am not surprised to see the characters 9ie because we told Java to print them treating them as UTF-8 characters. You may as well choose to read them as raw bytes..
Cookie: JSESSIONID=27D0A0637A0449CF65B3CB20F40048AF
is actually the last HTTP Header here. After that comes the HTTP Body, where meta and contents of the file we uploaded actually can be seen.
An HTTP message may have a body of data sent after the header lines. In a response, this is where the requested resource is returned to the client (the most common use of the message body), or perhaps explanatory text if there's an error. In a request, this is where user-entered data or uploaded files are sent to the server.
Source: Stackoverflow.com