[http] What should a Multipart HTTP request with multiple files look like?

I'm working on an iPhone app that makes a multipart HTTP request with multiple image files.

It looks like what's happening, on the server side, is that one of the images is getting parsed properly, but the other two files are not.

Can anybody post a sample HTTP multipart request that contains multiple image files?

This question is related to http file multipart

The answer is


EDIT: I am maintaining a similar, but more in-depth answer at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28380690/895245

To see exactly what is happening, use nc -l and an user agent like a browser or cURL.

Save the form to an .html file:

<form action="http://localhost:8000" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
  <p><input type="text" name="text" value="text default">
  <p><input type="file" name="file1">
  <p><input type="file" name="file2">
  <p><button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

Create files to upload:

echo 'Content of a.txt.' > a.txt
echo '<!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title>' > a.html

Run:

nc -l localhost 8000

Open the HTML on your browser, select the files and click on submit and check the terminal.

nc prints the request received. Firefox sent:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0
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
Cookie: __atuvc=34%7C7; permanent=0; _gitlab_session=226ad8a0be43681acf38c2fab9497240; __profilin=p%3Dt; request_method=GET
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------9051914041544843365972754266
Content-Length: 554

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text"

text default
-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="a.txt"
Content-Type: text/plain

Content of a.txt.

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file2"; filename="a.html"
Content-Type: text/html

<!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title>

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266--

Aternativelly, cURL should send the same POST request as your a browser form:

nc -l localhost 8000
curl -F "text=default" -F "[email protected]" -F "[email protected]" localhost:8000

You can do multiple tests with:

while true; do printf '' | nc -l localhost 8000; done