#HTTP Request Warmups

A good portion of your software career as a web developer will involve getting and sending HTTP requests.

The goal of this warm-up series Will be to parse HTTP headers, and turn the given information into useful data stored within an object.

##🐾🐾🐾🐾 Part One: GET 🐾🐾🐾🐾

💡 EXAMPLE:

If making a GET request to Spotify searching for the the Artist by the name of Bob Dylan, something like the following GET request header will be generated:

GET /v1/search?q=bob%20dylan&type=artist HTTP/1.1
Host: api.spotify.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Postman-Token: e2f09f98-f8e0-43f7-5f0e-b16e670399e2

The first line contains 3 parts:

• the HTTP verb,
• the path,
• and the protocol.

The remaining lines are the rest of the header.

Given this information, your goal will be to write a function that will parse this data to return an object with key value pairs in the following structure:

{ headers:
   { Host: ' api.spotify.com',
     'Cache-Control': ' no-cache',
     'Postman-Token': ' e2f09f98-f8e0-43f7-5f0e-b16e670399e2' },
  verb: 'GET',
  path: '/v1/search?q=bob%20dylan&type=artist',
  protocol: 'HTTP/1.1' }

💡 Note:

When the the header is passed to your function for any of these exercises, it will be a single string.

##🐾🐾🐾🐾 Part Two: POST 🐾🐾🐾🐾

If making a POST request to some api (Spotify in this case), something like the following POST request header will be generated (note that in practice the POST path will contain more information than in this simplified example):

💡 EXAMPLE:

If making a POST request, something like the following POST request will be generated:

POST /v1/ HTTP/1.1
Host: api.spotify.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Postman-Token: f6741a35-c20f-3051-e3f9-301904256b3f
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

fish=catfish&dog=dogfish

The line after the space in the example is the body of the POST request.

Modify your earlier function to determine if the string passed as a parameter is a GET or a POST request.

• If it is a GET request, do the same behavior as listed in part one.
• If it is a POST request, add a body object as a value in your response object with a key of body.
• In that body object, list all the key value pairs passed in the body of the input string.
• If POST, output from above example should be:

{ headers:
   { Host: ' api.spotify.com',
     'Cache-Control': ' no-cache',
     'Postman-Token': ' f6741a35-c20f-3051-e3f9-301904256b3f',
     'Content-Type': ' application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },
  verb: 'POST',
  path: '/v1/search?q=bob%20dylan&type=artist',
  protocol: 'HTTP/1.1',
  body: { fish: 'catfish', dog: 'dogfish' } }

##🐾🐾🐾🐾 Part Three: Query 🐾🐾🐾🐾

Now let's working with a query string! Taking a previous example where something like the following POST request header is generated, pull also pull out the query string into a seperate key/value pair inside the returned object.

💡 EXAMPLE:

If making a POST request, something like the following POST request will be generated:

GET /v1/search?q=bob%20dylan&type=artist HTTP/1.1
Host: api.spotify.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Postman-Token: f6741a35-c20f-3051-e3f9-301904256b3f
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

fish=catfish&dog=dogfish

The parts after the ? in the path are the query parameters

Modify your earlier function to determine if the string passed as a parameter contains a query string.

• if the path contains a query string, grab each key/value pair being queried and add those to a query property inside the response object.

{ headers:
   { Host: ' api.spotify.com',
     'Cache-Control': ' no-cache',
     'Postman-Token': ' f6741a35-c20f-3051-e3f9-301904256b3f',
     'Content-Type': ' application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },
  verb: 'POST',
  path: '/v1/search?q=bob%20dylan&type=artist',
  protocol: 'HTTP/1.1',
  query: { q: 'bob%20dylan', type: 'artist' },
  body: { fish: 'catfish', dog: 'dogfish' } }