I'm working on an iPhone app that makes a multipart HTTP request with multiple image files.
It looks like what's happening, on the server side, is that one of the images is getting parsed properly, but the other two files are not.
Can anybody post a sample HTTP multipart request that contains multiple image files?
Well, note that the request contains binary data, so I'm not posting the request as such - instead, I've converted every non-printable-ascii character into a dot (".").
POST /cgi-bin/qtest HTTP/1.1 Host: aram User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://aram/~martind/banner.htm Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=2a8ae6ad-f4ad-4d9a-a92c-6d217011fe0f Content-Length: 514 --2a8ae6ad-f4ad-4d9a-a92c-6d217011fe0f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="datafile1"; filename="r.gif" Content-Type: image/gif GIF87a.............,...........D..; --2a8ae6ad-f4ad-4d9a-a92c-6d217011fe0f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="datafile2"; filename="g.gif" Content-Type: image/gif GIF87a.............,...........D..; --2a8ae6ad-f4ad-4d9a-a92c-6d217011fe0f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="datafile3"; filename="b.gif" Content-Type: image/gif GIF87a.............,...........D..; --2a8ae6ad-f4ad-4d9a-a92c-6d217011fe0f-- Note that every line (including the last one) is terminated by a \r\n sequence.
EDIT: I am maintaining a similar, but more in-depth answer at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28380690/895245
To see exactly what is happening, use nc -l and a user agent like a browser or cURL.
Save the form to an .html file:
<form action="http://localhost:8000" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <p><input type="text" name="text" value="text default"> <p><input type="file" name="file1"> <p><input type="file" name="file2"> <p><button type="submit">Submit</button> </form> Create files to upload:
echo 'Content of a.txt.' > a.txt echo '<!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title>' > a.html Run:
nc -l localhost 8000 Open the HTML on your browser, select the files and click on submit and check the terminal.
nc prints the request received. Firefox sent:
POST / HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:8000 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Cookie: __atuvc=34%7C7; permanent=0; _gitlab_session=226ad8a0be43681acf38c2fab9497240; __profilin=p%3Dt; request_method=GET Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------9051914041544843365972754266 Content-Length: 554 -----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text" text default -----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="a.txt" Content-Type: text/plain Content of a.txt. -----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file2"; filename="a.html" Content-Type: text/html <!DOCTYPE html><title>Content of a.html.</title> -----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266-- Aternativelly, cURL should send the same POST request as your a browser form:
nc -l localhost 8000 curl -F "text=default" -F "[email protected]" -F "[email protected]" localhost:8000 You can do multiple tests with:
while true; do printf '' | nc -l localhost 8000; done 
wc to check it out + try to read the HTTP standard ;-) I think copy paste from stack overflow + xsel -b | wc does not match up because servers reply with \r\n at the end of each line, but those were converted to just \n at some point. Ping me if you conclude anything.