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Displaying binary responses in the command line client. #2049
Description
Using the command line client to access a binary URL...
$ httpx https://cataas.com/cat
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.12.2
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:41:25 GMT
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 35300
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
'�C�.�h�&�.\)��;s�-l�m/gN�<Ws��F...This behaviour isn't really ideal. The HTTP response is giving us enough information in the Content-Type to indicate that the response is binary, not text, so we could be doing better than this.
I'd much prefer for us to have better handling for this kind of case.
For example...
$ httpx https://cataas.com/cat
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.12.2
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:41:25 GMT
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 35300
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
<35300 bytes of binary data>Or...
$ httpx https://cataas.com/cat
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.12.2
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:41:25 GMT
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 35300
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
<35300 bytes of binary data>
00000000: ff d8 ff e0 00 10 4a 46 49 46 00 01-01 01 00 48 ......JF IF.....H
00000010: 00 48 00 00 ff db 00 43 00 08 06 06 07 06 05 08 .H.....C ........
00000020: 07 07 07 09 09 08 0a 0c 14 0d 0c 0b 0b 0c 19 12 ........ ........
00000030: 13 0f 14 1d 1a 1f 1e 1d 1a 1c 1c 20 24 2e 27 20 ........ ....$.'.
00000040: 22 2c 23 1c 1c 28 37 29 2c 30 31 34 34 34 1f 27 ",#..(7) ,01444.'
00000050: 39 3d 38 32 3c 2e 33 34 32 ff db 00 43 01 09 09 9=82<.34 2...C...
00000060: 09 0c 0b 0c 18 0d 0d 18 32 21 1c 21 32 32 32 32 ........ 2!.!2222
00000070: 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 22222222 22222222
00000080: 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 22222222 22222222
00000090: 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 ff c0 22222222 222222..I've not thought through what flags we'd want for controlling this display, but it seems like an obvious improvement for us to make, and I'm sure we could do a very nice job of how it's displayed with rich.
Activity
lovelydinosaur commentedon Jan 27, 2022
Jotting down a couple of possibly useful resources...
waterfountain1996 commentedon Feb 9, 2022
I've played around with it and I found that larger responses will take unreasonable amount of time to print (600kb takes ~20s on my machine). What would you suggest as a way around that? As for the flags, I think we could borrow the idea from curl, where it will not print the response unless output file is specified with
--outputflag.lovelydinosaur commentedon Feb 9, 2022
I gave the
hexdumpstyle a try, and while I thought it was neat, there's not really any way I'd actually be using it in depth. At least not as my default behaviour.I think a good enough pass at this point would simply be to do the following for binary content...
I think we want a switch here:
httpx/httpx/_main.py
Line 178 in a416106
To output as text for
Content-Type: text/...and output as binary otherwise.waterfountain1996 commentedon Feb 9, 2022
I'll submit a PR for this
Suppress binary output on the command line (#2049) (#2076)
Suppress binary output on the command line (encode#2049) (encode#2076)