I've been trying to get the top news story from Hacker News, though an example from any website would do.
Here is my code by the way:
let getHTML = function (url, callback) {
// Feature detection
if (!window.XMLHttpRequest) return;
// Create new request
let xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
// Setup callback
xhr.onload = function () {
if (callback && typeof (callback) === 'function') {
callback(this.responseXML);
}
};
// Get the HTML
xhr.open('GET', url);
xhr.responseType = 'document';
xhr.send();
};
getHTML('https://news.ycombinator.com/news', function (response) {
let someElem = document.querySelector('#someElementFromMyPage');
let someOtherElem = response.querySelector('#someElementFromOtherPage');
someElem.innerHTML = someOtherElem.innerHTML;
});
This should display the element from other page and bring it to my page.
When I run your code, I get a CORS error in the browser dev-tools console (more details here).
Problem
Basically the target website (https://news.ycombinator.com/news) is restricting how a Browser can request it. And the browser conforms and respects this restriction.
The JS code makes the request.
The browser reads the response and looks at the HTTP headers included in the response from (https://news.ycombinator.com/news)
Because there's X-Frame-Options: DENY and X-XSS-Protection: 1 mode=block the browser won't let you read the request in the JS code, so you get an error.
Solution
There's many options for getting around CORS errors, you can research them yourself:
Funnel requests through a proxy-server, routing CORS requests through another server that strips off the pesky CORS headers. maybe this?
Run a server for web-scraping, servers don't have to respect Headers like the browser does, so you can GET anything. maybe try this
Scraping within the browser is increasingly hard, so you need to use other solutions to take content from other sites.
Hope this helps!
The chrome.webRequest API has the concept of a request ID (source: Chrome webRequest documention):
Request IDs
Each request is identified by a request ID. This ID is unique within a browser session and the context of an extension. It remains constant during the the life cycle of a request and can be used to match events for the same request. Note that several HTTP requests are mapped to one web request in case of HTTP redirection or HTTP authentication.
You can use it to correlate the requests even across redirects. But how do you initially get hold off the id when start a new request with fetch or XMLHttpRequest?
So far, I have not found anything better than to use the URL of the request as a way to make the initial link between the new request and the requestId. However, if there are overlapping requests to the same resource, this is not reliable.
Questions:
If you make a new request (either with fetch or XMLHttpRequest), how do you reliably get access to the requestId?
Does the fetch API or XMLHttpRequest API allow access to the requestId?
What I want to do is to use the functionality provided by the webRequest API to modify a single request, but I want to make sure that I do not accidentally modify other pending requests.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no direct support in the fetch or XHMLHttpRequest API. Also I'm not aware of completely reliable way to get hold of the requestId.
What I ended up doing was installing a onBeforeRequest listener, storing the requestId, and then immediately removing the listener again. For instance, it could look like this:
function makeSomeRequest(url) {
let listener;
const removeListener = () => {
if (listener) {
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.removeListener(listener);
listener = null;
}
};
let requestId;
listener = (details) => {
if (!requestId && urlMatches(details.url, url)) {
requestId = details.requestId;
removeListener();
}
};
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(listener, { urls: ['<all_urls>'] });
// install other listeners, which can then use the stored "requestId"
// ...
// finally, start the actual request, for instance
const promise = fetch(url).then(doSomething);
// and make sure to always clean up the listener
promise.then(removeListener, removeLister);
}
It is not perfect, and matching the URL is a detail that I left open. You could simply compare whether the details.url is identical to url:
function urlMatches(url1, url2) {
return url1 === url2;
}
Note that it is not guaranteed that you see the identical URL, for instance, if make a request against http://some.domain.test, you will see http://some.domain.test/ in your listener (see my other question about the details). Or http:// could have been replaced by https:// (here I'm not sure, but it could be because of other extensions like HTTPS Everywhere).
That is why the code above should only be seen as a sketch of the idea. It seems to work good enough in practice, as long as you do not start multiple requests to the identical URL. Still, I would be interested in learning about a better way to approach the problem.
How do I access a page's HTTP response headers via JavaScript?
Related to this question, which was modified to ask about accessing two specific HTTP headers.
Related:
How do I access the HTTP request header fields via JavaScript?
It's not possible to read the current headers. You could make another request to the same URL and read its headers, but there is no guarantee that the headers are exactly equal to the current.
Use the following JavaScript code to get all the HTTP headers by performing a get request:
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', document.location, false);
req.send(null);
var headers = req.getAllResponseHeaders().toLowerCase();
alert(headers);
Unfortunately, there isn't an API to give you the HTTP response headers for your initial page request. That was the original question posted here. It has been repeatedly asked, too, because some people would like to get the actual response headers of the original page request without issuing another one.
For AJAX Requests:
If an HTTP request is made over AJAX, it is possible to get the response headers with the getAllResponseHeaders() method. It's part of the XMLHttpRequest API. To see how this can be applied, check out the fetchSimilarHeaders() function below. Note that this is a work-around to the problem that won't be reliable for some applications.
myXMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders();
The API was specified in the following candidate recommendation for XMLHttpRequest: XMLHttpRequest - W3C Candidate Recommendation 3 August 2010
Specifically, the getAllResponseHeaders() method was specified in the following section: w3.org: XMLHttpRequest: the getallresponseheaders() method
The MDN documentation is good, too: developer.mozilla.org: XMLHttpRequest.
This will not give you information about the original page request's HTTP response headers, but it could be used to make educated guesses about what those headers were. More on that is described next.
Getting header values from the Initial Page Request:
This question was first asked several years ago, asking specifically about how to get at the original HTTP response headers for the current page (i.e. the same page inside of which the javascript was running). This is quite a different question than simply getting the response headers for any HTTP request. For the initial page request, the headers aren't readily available to javascript. Whether the header values you need will be reliably and sufficiently consistent if you request the same page again via AJAX will depend on your particular application.
The following are a few suggestions for getting around that problem.
1. Requests on Resources which are largely static
If the response is largely static and the headers are not expected to change much between requests, you could make an AJAX request for the same page you're currently on and assume that they're they are the same values which were part of the page's HTTP response. This could allow you to access the headers you need using the nice XMLHttpRequest API described above.
function fetchSimilarHeaders (callback) {
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (request.readyState === XMLHttpRequest.DONE) {
//
// The following headers may often be similar
// to those of the original page request...
//
if (callback && typeof callback === 'function') {
callback(request.getAllResponseHeaders());
}
}
};
//
// Re-request the same page (document.location)
// We hope to get the same or similar response headers to those which
// came with the current page, but we have no guarantee.
// Since we are only after the headers, a HEAD request may be sufficient.
//
request.open('HEAD', document.location, true);
request.send(null);
}
This approach will be problematic if you truly have to rely on the values being consistent between requests, since you can't fully guarantee that they are the same. It's going to depend on your specific application and whether you know that the value you need is something that won't be changing from one request to the next.
2. Make Inferences
There are some BOM properties (Browser Object Model) which the browser determines by looking at the headers. Some of these properties reflect HTTP headers directly (e.g. navigator.userAgent is set to the value of the HTTP User-Agent header field). By sniffing around the available properties you might be able to find what you need, or some clues to indicate what the HTTP response contained.
3. Stash them
If you control the server side, you can access any header you like as you construct the full response. Values could be passed to the client with the page, stashed in some markup or perhaps in an inlined JSON structure. If you wanted to have every HTTP request header available to your javascript, you could iterate through them on the server and send them back as hidden values in the markup. It's probably not ideal to send header values this way, but you could certainly do it for the specific value you need. This solution is arguably inefficient, too, but it would do the job if you needed it.
Using XmlHttpRequest you can pull up the current page and then examine the http headers of the response.
Best case is to just do a HEAD request and then examine the headers.
For some examples of doing this have a look at http://www.jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html
Just my 2 cents.
A solution with Service Workers
Service workers are able to access network information, which includes headers. The good part is that it works on any kind of request, not just XMLHttpRequest.
How it works:
Add a service worker on your website.
Watch every request that's being sent.
Make the service worker fetch the request with the respondWith function.
When the response arrives, read the headers.
Send the headers from the service worker to the page with the postMessage function.
Working example:
Service workers are a bit complicated to understand, so I've built a small library that does all this. It is available on github: https://github.com/gmetais/sw-get-headers.
Limitations:
the website needs to be on HTTPS
the browser needs to support the Service Workers API
the same-domain/cross-domain policies are in action, just like on XMLHttpRequest
Another way to send header information to JavaScript would be through cookies. The server can extract whatever data it needs from the request headers and send them back inside a Set-Cookie response header — and cookies can be read in JavaScript. As keparo says, though, it's best to do this for just one or two headers, rather than for all of them.
(2021) An answer without additional HTTP call
While it's not possible in general to read arbitrary HTTP response headers of the top-level HTML navigation, if you control the server (or middleboxes on the way) and want to expose some info to JavaScript that can't be exposed easily in any other way than via a header:
You may use Server-Timing header to expose arbitrary key-value data, and it will be readable by JavaScript.
(*in supported browsers: Firefox 61, Chrome 65, Edge 79; no Safari yet and no immediate plans for shipping as of 2021.09; no IE)
Example:
server-timing: key;desc="value"
You can use this header multiple times for multiple pieces of data:
server-timing: key1;desc="value1"
server-timing: key2;desc="value2"
or use its compact version where you expose multiple pieces of data in one header, comma-separated.
server-timing: key1;desc="value1", key2;desc="value2"
Example of how Wikipedia uses this header to expose info about cache hit/miss:
Code example (need to account for lack of browser support in Safari and IE):
if (window.performance && performance.getEntriesByType) { // avoid error in Safari 10, IE9- and other old browsers
let navTiming = performance.getEntriesByType('navigation')
if (navTiming.length > 0) { // still not supported as of Safari 14...
let serverTiming = navTiming[0].serverTiming
if (serverTiming && serverTiming.length > 0) {
for (let i=0; i<serverTiming.length; i++) {
console.log(`${serverTiming[i].name} = ${serverTiming[i].description}`)
}
}
}
}
This logs cache = hit-front in supported browsers.
Notes:
as mentioned on MDN, the API is only supported over HTTPS
if your JS is served from another domain, you have to add Timing-Allow-Origin response header to make the data readable to JS (Timing-Allow-Origin: * or Timing-Allow-Origin: https://www.example.com)
Server-Timing headers support also dur(header) field, readable as duration on JS side, but it's optional and defaults to 0 in JS if not passed
regarding Safari support: see bug 1 and bug 2 and bug 3
You can read more on server-timing in this blog post
Note that performance entries buffers might get cleaned by JS on the page (via an API call), or by the browser, if the page issues too many calls for subresources. For that reason, you should capture the data as soon as possible, and/or use PerformanceObserver API instead. See the blog post for details.
For those looking for a way to parse all HTTP headers into an object that can be accessed as a dictionary headers["content-type"], I've created a function parseHttpHeaders:
function parseHttpHeaders(httpHeaders) {
return httpHeaders.split("\n")
.map(x=>x.split(/: */,2))
.filter(x=>x[0])
.reduce((ac, x)=>{ac[x[0]] = x[1];return ac;}, {});
}
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', document.location, false);
req.send(null);
var headers = parseHttpHeaders(req.getAllResponseHeaders());
// Now we can do: headers["content-type"]
You can't access the http headers, but some of the information provided in them is available in the DOM. For example, if you want to see the http referer (sic), use document.referrer. There may be others like this for other http headers. Try googling the specific thing you want, like "http referer javascript".
I know this should be obvious, but I kept searching for stuff like "http headers javascript" when all I really wanted was the referer, and didn't get any useful results. I don't know how I didn't realize I could make a more specific query.
Like many people I've been digging the net with no real answer :(
I've nevertheless find out a bypass that could help others. In my case I fully control my web server. In fact it is part of my application (see end reference). It is easy for me to add a script to my http response. I modified my httpd server to inject a small script within every html pages. I only push a extra 'js script' line right after my header construction, that set an existing variable from my document within my browser [I choose location], but any other option is possible. While my server is written in nodejs, I've no doubt that the same technique can be use from PHP or others.
case ".html":
response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html");
response.write ("<script>location['GPSD_HTTP_AJAX']=true</script>")
// process the real contend of my page
Now every html pages loaded from my server, have this script executed by the browser at reception. I can then easily check from JavaScript if the variable exist or not. In my usecase I need to know if I should use JSON or JSON-P profile to avoid CORS issue, but the same technique can be used for other purposes [ie: choose in between development/production server, get from server a REST/API key, etc ....]
On the browser you just need to check variable directly from JavaScript as in my example, where I use it to select my Json/JQuery profile
// Select direct Ajax/Json profile if using GpsdTracking/HttpAjax server otherwise use JsonP
var corsbypass = true;
if (location['GPSD_HTTP_AJAX']) corsbypass = false;
if (corsbypass) { // Json & html served from two different web servers
var gpsdApi = "http://localhost:4080/geojson.rest?jsoncallback=?";
} else { // Json & html served from same web server [no ?jsoncallback=]
var gpsdApi = "geojson.rest?";
}
var gpsdRqt =
{key :123456789 // user authentication key
,cmd :'list' // rest command
,group :'all' // group to retreive
,round : true // ask server to round numbers
};
$.getJSON(gpsdApi,gpsdRqt, DevListCB);
For who ever would like to check my code:
https://www.npmjs.org/package/gpsdtracking
Allain Lalonde's link made my day.
Just adding some simple working html code here.
Works with any reasonable browser since ages plus IE9+ and Presto-Opera 12.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>(XHR) Show all response headers</title>
<h1>All Response Headers with XHR</h1>
<script>
var X= new XMLHttpRequest();
X.open("HEAD", location);
X.send();
X.onload= function() {
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("pre")).textContent= X.getAllResponseHeaders();
}
</script>
Note: You get headers of a second request, the result may differ from the initial request.
Another way is the more modern fetch() API
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowOrWorkerGlobalScope/fetch
Per caniuse.com it's supported by Firefox 40, Chrome 42, Edge 14, Safari 11
Working example code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>fetch() all Response Headers</title>
<h1>All Response Headers with fetch()</h1>
<script>
var x= "";
if(window.fetch)
fetch(location, {method:'HEAD'})
.then(function(r) {
r.headers.forEach(
function(Value, Header) { x= x + Header + "\n" + Value + "\n\n"; }
);
})
.then(function() {
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("pre")).textContent= x;
});
else
document.write("This does not work in your browser - no support for fetch API");
</script>
If we're talking about Request headers, you can create your own headers when doing XmlHttpRequests.
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.setRequestHeader("X-Requested-With", "XMLHttpRequest");
request.open("GET", path, true);
request.send(null);
To get the headers as an object which is handier (improvement of Raja's answer):
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('GET', document.location, false);
req.send(null);
var headers = req.getAllResponseHeaders().toLowerCase();
headers = headers.split(/\n|\r|\r\n/g).reduce(function(a, b) {
if (b.length) {
var [ key, value ] = b.split(': ');
a[key] = value;
}
return a;
}, {});
I've just tested, and this works for me using Chrome Version 28.0.1500.95.
I was needing to download a file and read the file name. The file name is in the header so I did the following:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('POST', url, true);
xhr.responseType = "blob";
xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (xhr.readyState == 4) {
success(xhr.response); // the function to proccess the response
console.log("++++++ reading headers ++++++++");
var headers = xhr.getAllResponseHeaders();
console.log(headers);
console.log("++++++ reading headers end ++++++++");
}
};
Output:
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 16:21:33 GMT
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=testFileName.doc
Content-Length: 20
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
This is my script to get all the response headers:
var url = "< URL >";
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open('HEAD', url, false);
req.send(null);
var headers = req.getAllResponseHeaders();
//Show alert with response headers.
alert(headers);
Having as a result the response headers.
This is a comparison test using Hurl.it:
Using mootools, you can use this.xhr.getAllResponseHeaders()
This is an old question. Not sure when support became more broad, but getAllResponseHeaders() and getResponseHeader() appear to now be fairly standard: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/dom_http.asp
As has already been mentioned, if you control the server side then it should be possible to send the initial request headers back to the client in the initial response.
In Express, for example, the following works:
app.get('/somepage', (req, res) => {
res.render('somepage.hbs', {headers: req.headers});
})
The headers are then available within the template, so could be hidden visually but included in the markup and read by clientside javascript.
I think the question went in the wrong way,
If you want to take the Request header from JQuery/JavaScript the answer is simply No. The other solutions is create a aspx page or jsp page then we can easily access the request header.
Take all the request in aspx page and put into a session/cookies then you can access the cookies in JavaScript page..
I want to retrieve a HTML page as document inside a Firefox/Greasemonkey userscript.
Edit: This is not a cross-domain request.
Here's my example code:
var r = new XMLHttpRequest();
r.open("GET", document.location.href, true);
r.responseType = "document";
r.send(null);
This looks just like the example in https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML_in_XMLHttpRequest ,
but r.send(null) causes a TypeError. Causes, not throws! Wrapping the line in a try...catch won't change anything, it seems like a callback or an event handler raises the exception:
TypeError: document.location is null
The traceback refers to a Firefox-internal event.js file, but not to my script.
Removing the line setting the responseType gets rid of the exception, adding callbacks does not.
However, the response is valid and responseXML provides a DOM tree.
I'm using FF 13.0.1.
Am I missing something or is this a bug?
Solution: This had something to do with an extension created by Mozilla's Addon Builder, not Firefox.
The script is running on google.com and you are trying to fetch google.de, right? That's a cross-domain request. (Also, the question code is not a valid synch or asynch use of XMLHttpRequest.)
To do cross-domain (or not) AJAX in a Greasemonkey script (Or Chrome), use GM_xmlhttpRequest().
Note that GM_xmlhttpRequest() does not currently let you specify responseType, but you don't need to do that in this case anyway. If you want a nice parsed document, use DOMParser.
Putting it all together:
GM_xmlhttpRequest ( {
method: 'GET',
//url: 'https://www.google.de/',
url: location.href, // self get, checking for updates
onload: function (respDetails) {
processResponse (respDetails);
}
} );
function processResponse (respDetails) {
// DO ALL RESPONSE PROCESSING HERE...
var parser = new DOMParser ();
var doc = parser.parseFromString (respDetails.responseText, "text/html");
//--- Example showing that the doc is fully parsed/functional...
console.log (doc.querySelectorAll ("p") );
}
PS: Since this is not cross-domain after all, the original code, corrected would be:
var r = new XMLHttpRequest();
r.onload = function () {
// DO ALL RESPONSE PROCESSING HERE...
console.log (this.response.querySelectorAll ("div") );
}
r.open ("GET", location.href, true);
r.responseType = "document";
r.send (null);
for an asynchronous request.
Unfortunately, you cannot do Ajax from one domain to another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy
You can read into CORS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing
or JSONP as possible solutions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP
However, browsers are designed in such a way so that people can't just randomly create Ajax requests across domains due to this being a security issue.
If you absolutely need to grab content off a different domain, I'd look into creating your own server API using cURL, serving your own content on the same domain, and then using Ajax there. Otherwise, you'll have to see if Google will grant CORS access or has some sort of built in JSONP request.
Is it possible to prevent the browser from following redirects when sending XMLHttpRequest-s (i.e. to get the redirect status code back and handle it myself)?
Not according to the W3C standard for the XMLHttpRequest object (emphasis added):
If the response is an HTTP redirect:
If the origin of the URL conveyed by the Location header is same origin
with the XMLHttpRequest origin and the
redirect does not violate infinite
loop precautions, transparently
follow the redirect while observing
the same-origin request event rules.
They were considering it for a future release:
This specification does not include
the following features which are being
considered for a future version of
this specification:
Property to disable following redirects;
but the latest specification no longer mentions this.
The new Fetch API supports different modes of redirect handling: follow, error, and manual, but I can't find a way to view the new URL or the status code when the redirection has been canceled. You just can stop the redirection itself, and then it looks like an error (empty response). If that's all you need, you are good to go. Also you should be aware that the requests made via this API are not cancelable yet. They are now.
As for XMLHttpRequest, you can HEAD the server and inspect whether the URL has changed:
var http = new XMLHttpRequest();
http.open('HEAD', '/the/url');
http.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (this.readyState === this.DONE) {
console.log(this.responseURL);
}
};
http.send();
You won't get the status code, but will find the new URL without downloading the whole page from it.
No you there isn't any place in the API exposed by XMLHttpRequest that allows you to override its default behaviour of following a 301 or 302 automatically.
If the client is running IE on windows then you can use WinHTTP instead to set an option to prevent that behaviour but thats a very limiting solution.
You can use responseURL property to get the redirect destination or check whether the response was ultimately fetched from a location you accept.
This of course means the result is fetched anyway, but at least you can get the necessary info about the redirect destination and for example detect conditions when you would like to discard the response.
I extended user's answer to include an abort() call. It seems like this prevents the server from sending too much data when all you want is the redirect url.
var url = 'the url'
var http = new XMLHttpRequest();
http.open('GET', url);
http.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (this.readyState === this.DONE) {
console.log(this.responseURL)
this.abort() // This seems to stop the response
}
}
http.send()
In real life I wrapped the above code in a promise, but it made the code hard to read.
Also, I don't understand why getting the redirect url needs to be this difficult, but that is a question for another time and place.
It is not possible to handle redirect or 302 status at client side as answered in other comments. However you can prevent redirection. To do that you can set request header "X-Requested-With" with "XMLHttpRequest"
xhttp.setRequestHeader("X-Requested-With", "XMLHttpRequest");
This should be done after open but before send. Example below
let xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) {
reqObj.success(JSON.parse(this.responseText))
} else if (this.status != 200) {
reqObj.error(this.statusText)
}
};
xhttp.open(reqObj.type, reqObj.url, reqObj.async);
xhttp.setRequestHeader("X-Requested-With", "XMLHttpRequest");
xhttp.send();