pecl/http update

Yeah, you guessed, version 0.23 of pecl/http has been released, and it’s time for a feature update ;)

Cookies

http_parse_cookie() has been reimplemented (and HttpRequest::getResponseCookie() has been moved to HttpRequest::getResponseCookies(). After revisiting the original Netscape draft and the two cookie RFCs it was pretty obvious that the previous implementation was pretty bogus.

Now it works as follows:

http_parse_cookie("cookie1=value; cookie2=\"1;2;3;4\"; path=/");  
/*  
stdClass Object  
(  
    [cookies] => Array  
        (  
            [cookie1] => value  
            [cookie2] => 1;2;3;4  
        )  
  
    [extras] => Array  
        (  
        )  
  
    [flags] => 0  
    [expires] => 0  
    [path] => /  
    [domain] =>  
)  
*/  

As you can see, a cookie line can have several name/value pairs. The standard additional fields like expires, path etc. are recogniced automatically. The RFCs, though, define some other standard extra elements, here’s where the third parameter of http_parse_cookie() plays in:

http_parse_cookie("cookie1=value; cookie2=\"1;2;3;4\"; comment=\"none\"; path=/",  
    0, array("comment"));  
/*  
stdClass Object  
(  
    [cookies] => Array  
        (  
            [cookie1] => value  
            [cookie2] => 1;2;3;4  
        )  
  
    [extras] => Array  
        (  
            [comment] => none  
        )  
  
    [flags] => 0  
    [expires] => 0  
    [path] => /  
    [domain] =>  
)  
*/

If “comment” wouldn’t have been specified as an allowed extra element, it would just have been recognized as another cookie.
IF you pass HTTP_COOKIE_PARSE_RAW as second parameter to http_parse_cookie(), no urldecoding is performed.
The flags in the return value is a bitmask of HTTP_COOKIE_SECURE and HTTP_COOKIE_HTTPONLY.

Messages

Some users pointed me to the fact that neither HttpMessage nor HttpRequest provide accessors to the HTTP response reason phrase AKA status text. They’ve been added in form of HttpMessage::getResponseStatus() and HttpRequest::getResponseStatus().

Some might have wondered why HttpMessages are chained in kind of a reverse order. Well, that has internal reasons, caused by how we retreive the data from libcurl and how the message parser works. Anyway there’s now HttpMessage::reverse() which reorders the messages in a more intuitive chronical way:

$msg = new HttpMessage(  
"GET / HTTP/1.1  
HTTP/1.1 302 Found  
Location: /foo  
GET /foo HTTP/1.1  
HTTP/1.1 200 Ok");  
foreach ($msg as $m) echo $m;  
foreach ($msg->reverse() as $m) echo $m;  
/*  
HTTP/1.1 200 Ok  
GET /foo HTTP/1.1  
HTTP/1.1 302 Found  
Location: /foo  
GET / HTTP/1.1  
  
GET / HTTP/1.1  
HTTP/1.1 302 Found  
Location: /foo  
GET /foo HTTP/1.1  
HTTP/1.1 200 Ok  
*/  

Note, though, that HttpMessage::toString(true) automatically prepends parent messages, i.e. gives the latter result.

Requests

For servers that don’t urldecode cookies, a new option has been added, named “encodecookies”, which omits urlencoding cookies if set to FALSE.

Similarily to the “lastmodified” request option, there’s now an “etag” option working along the same lines.

HttpRequest::getHistory() now returns a real HttpMessage property, which measn that this message chain is no longer immutable to changes made by the user.

If a request fails for some reason, you should now be able to get the error message through HttpRequest::getResponseInfo(“error”).