How to view/debug non-standard request headers my phone's browser is sending?

Question

There are many websites that display and let you see standard request headers.

But I could not find any website that actually displays non-standard request headers, by triggering my WebView-based Android app to send certain fields.

More specifically, I am looking to see what my Android phone is sending in the X-Requested-With field.

Note: I am not looking for a Firefox add-on, because my goal is not to see how the other side responds to a synthesized request. What am looking for is a way to know what the other side (website) is seeing from my particular Android device.

Try to open this in your Webview: http://shush.mobi/request.php — Sherif elKhatib, Aug 06 '13 at 17:40

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 04 '13 at 17:10

Have not found a site that does what you wanted to do, but you can easily make a PHP script that does it for you:

<?php
$headers = getallheaders();

foreach ($headers as $name => $value) {
    echo $name . '=' . $value . '<br/>';
}
?>

You can easily upload this in one of your PHP servers. If you do not have one, you can setup one using XAMPP

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 29 '13 at 02:50

Besides using a tool like jsconsole (see quote & url below about that) to inspect what your phone's browser is doing, you have a few other options as well.

Depending your level of control over the site that is sending these requests out, or the server, you may be able to open up your server's logs and examine the kinds of requests coming through.

If you don't have that control, and your phone is on your LAN (connected to the same Wifi network as your computer) you may consider using Wireshark to examine packets; this is tougher but is a good exercise in understanding what is going on in your network. You can use the filter functionality to localize the tcp packet dump to display only those outbound from your phone's IP address. If there is a lot of noise, you can narrow the filter down to include those inbound to the target site you're interested in.

Most likely though, jsconsole is what you're looking for. Good luck!

jsconsole.com is a simple JavaScript command line tool. However, it also provides the ability to bridge across to other browser windows to remotely control and debug that window - be it in another browser or another device altogether.

http://jsconsole.com/remote-debugging.html

Thanks +1 for being the first to offer help. I am afraid, however, that `jsconsole` is not really what I'm looking for: It seems to be mainly for `console.log` messages (which LogCat already displays, BTW). I am looking for a website that's more "pro-active", i.e. communicating with my WebView-based app in a way that triggers my WebView to send `X-Requested-With`, then the website itself will display the value it receives. Something similar to this [HTTP Header Viewer](http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html) but even more pervasive. Can `jsconsole` be used for that? — stumpped, Jul 30 '13 at 23:24
No problem, sorry you are still stuck on this. I don't think I fully understand what you're trying to do although if you just need a URL to hit which will tell you about what headers are incoming, I've whipped one together using Rack to show you, along with this screenshot of me entering an arbitrary header and viewing it on the receiving side. Screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/09193v1f393c Code: https://gist.github.com/keyvanfatehi/6149360 — keyvan, Aug 04 '13 at 06:02

talkol · Answer 3 · 2013-08-06T21:22:05.547

I'm pretty sure we can find a site that shows all the headers like you want. I'll do my best to help you look.

After a lot of googling I stumbled upon this one:

http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html

On my iPad it shows some extra non-standard headers so I have a good feeling it's what you're looking for. Access this page from your app and it will display the headers.

Edit: Try this one as well, I find it hard to believe that they are faking the raw dump of the request :

http://request.urih.com

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 04 '13 at 15:09

As keyvan mentioned some of them, there are several ways you can achieve this:

Analysing Packets, you can use Wireshark for this, this is the best if you are not only debugging HTTP or you don't have much control over the request/response.
Dumping your request/response, you can use console to dump logs and read them in logcat or server side for response to be a dump of your request
Using something in the middle like a proxy.
Some other techniques I'm not yet aware of.

I often use a proxy because is just the easiest, I use Charles (haven't found something better) but there are some other free alternatives like Andiparos:

And here is the sample to generate X-Hello using jQuery

You can set it up in your Wi-Fi settings (using Charles you will have to accept the first connection.)

How to view/debug non-standard request headers my phone's browser is sending?

4 Answers4