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Author Arve.Knudsen
Recipients Arve.Knudsen
Date 2012-05-04.10:06:42
SpamBayes Score -1.0
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Message-id <1336126003.87.0.468277340816.issue14721@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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Content
httplib doesn't specify the HTTP header 'content-length' for POST requests without data. Conceptually this makes sense, considering the empty content. However, IIS (7.5) servers don't accept such requests and respond with a 411 status code. See this question on StackOverflow for reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5915131/can-i-send-an-empty-http-post-webrequest-object-from-c-sharp-to-iis.

See also issue #223 of the Requests project, https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/223, which regards this problem in the context of the requests Python library.

The following code makes a data-less POST request to the HTTP sniffer Fiddler running on localhost:
import httplib
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("localhost", 8888)
conn.request("POST", "/post", "", {})
conn.close()

Fiddler reports that it receives the following headers for the POST request, as you can see 'content-length' is not included:
POST http://localhost:8888/post HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8888
Accept-Encoding: identity
History
Date User Action Args
2012-05-04 10:06:44Arve.Knudsensetrecipients: + Arve.Knudsen
2012-05-04 10:06:43Arve.Knudsensetmessageid: <1336126003.87.0.468277340816.issue14721@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2012-05-04 10:06:43Arve.Knudsenlinkissue14721 messages
2012-05-04 10:06:42Arve.Knudsencreate