HttpServletRequest - how to obtain the referring URL

Question

I need to log URLs that are linking to my site in a Java Servlet

User · Answer

As all have mentioned it is  request getHeader  referer      I would like to add some more details about security aspect of referer header in contrast with accepted answer  In Open Web Application Security Project OWASP  cheat sheets  under Cross-Site Request Forgery  CSRF  Prevention Cheat Sheet it mentions about importance of referer header      More importantly for this recommended Same Origin check  a number of HTTP request headers can t be set by JavaScript because they are on the  forbidden  headers list  Only the browsers themselves can set values for these headers  making them more trustworthy because not even an XSS vulnerability can be used to modify them       The Source Origin check recommended here relies on three of these   protected headers  Origin  Referer  and Host  making it a pretty   strong CSRF defense all on its own    You can refer Forbidden header list here  User agent ie browser  has the full control over these headers not the user

User · Answer

The URLs are passed in the request  request getRequestURL      If you mean other sites that are linking to you   You want to capture the HTTP Referrer  which you can do by calling    request getHeader  referer

User · Answer

It s available in the HTTP referer header  You can get it in a servlet as follows   String referrer   request getHeader  referer       Yes  with the legendary misspelling    You  however  need to realize that this is a client-controlled value and can thus be spoofed to something entirely different or even removed  Thus  whatever value it returns  you should not use it for any critical business processes in the backend  but only for presentation control  e g  hiding showing changing certain pure layout parts  and or statistics   For the interested  background about the misspelling can be found in Wikipedia

User · Answer

Actually it s   request getHeader  Referer     or even better  and to be 100  sure   request getHeader HttpHeaders REFERER    where HttpHeaders is com google common net HttpHeaders

[java] HttpServletRequest - how to obtain the referring URL?

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