Posts Tagged ‘ENCODING’

Tiny PHP script to dump your browser set HTTP headers (useful in debugging)

Friday, March 30th, 2012

While browsing I stumbled upon a nice blog article

Dumping HTTP headers

The arcitle, points at few ways to DUMP the HTTP headers obtained from user browser.
As I'm not proficient with Ruby, Java and AOL Server what catched my attention is a tiny php for loop, which loops through all the HTTP_* browser set variables and prints them out. Here is the PHP script code:

<?php<br />
foreach($_SERVER as $h=>$v)<br />
if(ereg('HTTP_(.+)',$h,$hp))<br />
echo "<li>$h = $v</li>\n";<br />
header('Content-type: text/html');<br />
?>

The script is pretty easy to use, just place it in a directory on a WebServer capable of executing php and save it under a name like:
show_HTTP_headers.php

If you don't want to bother copy pasting above code, you can also download the dump_HTTP_headers.php script here , rename the dump_HTTP_headers.php.txt to dump_HTTP_headers.php and you're ready to go.

Follow to the respective url to exec the script. I've installed the script on my webserver, so if you are curious of the output the script will be returning check your own browser HTTP set values by clicking here.
PHP will produce output like the one in the screenshot you see below, the shot is taken from my Opera browser:

Screenshot show HTTP headers.php script Opera Debian Linux

Another sample of the text output the script produce whilst invoked in my Epiphany GNOME browser is:

HTTP_HOST = www.pc-freak.net
HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6
HTTP_ACCEPT = application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING = gzip
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en-us, en;q=0.90
HTTP_COOKIE = __qca=P0-2141911651-1294433424320;
__utma_a2a=8614995036.1305562814.1274005888.1319809825.1320152237.2021;wooMeta=MzMxJjMyOCY1NTcmODU1MDMmMTMwODQyNDA1MDUyNCYxMzI4MjcwNjk0ODc0JiYxMDAmJjImJiYm; 3ec0a0ded7adebfeauth=22770a75911b9fb92360ec8b9cf586c9;
__unam=56cea60-12ed86f16c4-3ee02a99-3019;
__utma=238407297.1677217909.1260789806.1333014220.1333023753.1606;
__utmb=238407297.1.10.1333023754; __utmc=238407297;
__utmz=238407297.1332444980.1586.413.utmcsr=www.pc-freak.net|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/blog/

You see the script returns, plenty of useful information for debugging purposes:
HTTP_HOST – Virtual Host Webserver name
HTTP_USER_AGENT – The browser exact type useragent returnedHTTP_ACCEPT – the type of MIME applications accepted by the WebServerHTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE – The language types the browser has support for
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING – This PHP variable is usually set to gzip or deflate by the browser if the browser has support for webserver returned content gzipping.
If HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING is there, then this means remote webserver is configured to return its HTML and static files in gzipped form.
HTTP_COOKIE – Information about browser cookies, this info can be used for XSS attacks etc. 🙂
HTTP_COOKIE also contains the referrar which in the above case is:
__utmz=238407297.1332444980.1586.413.utmcsr=www.pc-freak.net|utmccn=(referral)
The Cookie information HTTP var also contains information of the exact link referrar:
|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/blog/

For the sake of comparison show_HTTP_headers.php script output from elinks text browser is like so:

* HTTP_HOST = www.pc-freak.net
* HTTP_USER_AGENT = Links (2.3pre1; Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 x86_64; 143x42)
* HTTP_ACCEPT = */*
* HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING = gzip,deflate * HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET = us-ascii, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, windows-1250, windows-1251, windows-1252, windows-1256,
windows-1257, cp437, cp737, cp850, cp852, cp866, x-cp866-u, x-mac, x-mac-ce, x-kam-cs, koi8-r, koi8-u, koi8-ru, TCVN-5712, VISCII,utf-8 * HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE = en,*;q=0.1
* HTTP_CONNECTION = keep-alive
One good reason, why it is good to give this script a run is cause it can help you reveal problems with HTTP headers impoperly set cookies, language encoding problems, security holes etc. Also the script is a good example, for starters in learning PHP programming.

 

Fix weird problem with Apache default encoding (AddDefaultCharset) not taking effect on FreeBSD with Apache version (2.0.63)

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

I encountered a weird problems a couple of minutes before. I tried to put some text files written in UTF-8 which contain cyrillic in the file names as well as the content the files has in my Apache directory listing. Trying that produced a lot of “alien symbols” for both file names and file content.
I have to admit that wasn’t exactly what I expected. I’ve checked my /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf just to find out I already have the:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

within in the configuration, I thought that somehow Apache could have difficulties applying that rules for the custom Virtualhost and therefore give the directive a try locally in the VirtualHost. Grievously that didn’t produced any positive result. That’s why I decided to check if somebody has experienced the same weird behavior and I stumbled on this wondeful blog post .
In short on the plug and pray’s blog … Wait and moment plug and pray? Yes you read that correctly it’s plug and pray :), on that blog it’s explained that newer versions of Apache 2.2.4 as this is the version the blogger talks about as well as the latest Apache release has an issue with AddDefaultCharset not working anymore. Fortunately the issue with the AddDefaultCharset not taking effect in Apache no more is easily solved. All that needs to be done is including the:

IndexOptions Charset=UTF-8

Within Apache conf file. In my case on FreeBSD I had to include that in /usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf after which all worked perfectly fine and I can see all my cyrillic symbols showing anew.

Howto to detect file encoding and convert default encoding of given files from one encoding to another on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I wanted to convert an html document character encoding to UTF-8, to achieve that of
course it was first needed to determine what kind of character encoding was used in
creation time of the file.
First thing I tried was:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ file File-Whole.htm
File-Whole.htm: HTML document text

as you can see that’s shit cause for some reason mime encoding is not printed by the file
command.
Next what I tried was:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ file --mime File-Whole.htm1File-Whole.htm1: text/html; charset=unknown-8bit

Here you see that character encoding is reported as charset=unknown-8bit which
ain’t cool at all and is of no use and prompts an error if I try it in iconv
Here is why I needed concretely to determine what kind of character set my file uses to later
be able to convert it using iconv .
To achieve my goal after consulting with Mr. Google , I found
out about enca — detect and convert encoding of text files
It’s obviously my lucky day because good guys from Debian has packaged enca so, everything came to the point of
apt-getting it.
# apt-get install enca

On FreeBSD enca port is available, so installing it cames simply to installing it from port tree.
Here is how:
pcfreak# cd /usr/ports/converters/enca;pcfreak# make install clean

Now I tried launching enca directly without any program parameters, but I was unlucky:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ enca file-Whole.htm
enca: Cannot determine (or understand) your language preferences.
Please use `-L language', or `-L none' if your language is not supported
(only a few multibyte encodings can be recognized then).
Run `enca --list languages' to get a list of supported languages.

I gave it another try, following prescribed usage parameters though I first checked my possibility
as a languages I can pass by to enca’s -L parameter.
Preliminary knowing that my text contains text in Bulgarian language, it wasn’t such a big deal
for me to determine the required language:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ enca -L bulgarian File-Whole.htm
transformation format 8 bits; CP1251

Knowing my character set all left for me was to do do the convert to UTF-8 to make text,
much more accessible.

hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ iconv --from-code=unknown-8bit --to=UTF-8 File-Whole.htm > File-Whole.htm.new
hipo@noah:~/Desktop/test$ mv File-Whole.htm.new File-Whole.htm

Well here we are conversion mission accomplished 🙂