HttpServletRequest and getHeader(): How to handle case insensitive headers properly?

Question

Since I discovered that HTTP headers are case-insensive according to the RFC, i was wondering how I can access HTTP headers in a case-insensitive way with Servlets. There is a #getHeader(String) method to obtain a header but it turned out that this method treats the header fields case sensitive.

Is there a "case insensitive" way to get header fields ? Or do i have to iterate over all the header fields to find the header field I was looking for ?

Solution 1

Which servlet container are you using? The docs for getHeader(String) state:

The header name is case insensitive.

so it sounds like a bug in the container you're using.

Solution 2

tomcat 8.0.24 impl of getHeader delegates to 'org.apache.tomcat.util.http.MimeHeaders' which eventually calls this method below which in turn does case insensitive check

313  public MessageBytes getValue(String name) {

Comments

[Malax]

Actually, its Jetty 5. I'll investigate this issue, thank for pointing me to the Java EE documentation... ;-)

[matt b]

I think Jetty might be up to version 6 (or 7?), you might want to take a look at upgrading.

[bmauter]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I just wanted to note that Tomcat 7.0.39 also returns case sensitive headers.

[Jon Skeet]

@bmauter: Do you mean that if you request CONTENT-TYPE it won't give you the value for Content-Type? That sounds broken...

[bmauter]

@JonSkeet Correct. I asked for "Authorization" and got nothing when iOS sent "authorization". I can reproduce this at will.

[Jon Skeet]

@bmauter: Odd. I'd file a bug against Tomcat (or see if there's an existing one). It's clearly violating the spec, judging by your description.

[bmauter]

@JonSkeet Nevermind, it looks like I am an idiot. Sorry about that.

[Raul Luna]

Actually, Tomcat 8.0.9 is doing this way: the headers are all lowercase. :((

[abdel]

same as @JonSkeet , getHeader("Authorization") is failing to recognize header "authorization", and this is on tomcat8. When i change the actual header to "Authorization" then it works.