Reading a client's header from Python CGI script?

Question

I\'m writing a very simple web service, written in Python and run as CGI on an Apache server.

According to Python docs (somewhere... I forgot where), I can use sys.stdin

Answer 1

If you are running as a CGI, you can't read the HTTP header directly, but the web server put much of that information into environment variables for you. You can just pick it out of os.environ[]

The list of environment variables that might be there is pretty long. You can find it by doing a web search for "common gateway interface". For example, in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3875.txt they are called "meta-variables".