Well, in most languages there’s a way to dump out some of the bits and pieces from the headers, but getting both request and response can be a bit of a pain. But you don’t need to worry about that, now… just use LiveHTTPHeaders.

It’s a pretty simple tool. You set it up as a sidebar or have it open in a new tab in FireFox or Mozilla, and when you hit a page, it gives you your request and the server’s response headers. You can leave images, css, etc in or filter them out via regex.

Here’s an example:

GET http://forevergeek.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
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
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:01:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 31837
Age: 16759

Here’s another one with a post request:

POST http://forevergeek.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
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
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://forevergeek.com/
Cookie: user=JC(rest removed)
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 26
search=freeflatscreens.com

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:44:38 GMT
Server: Apache
Pragma: No-Cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 3919
Age: 2

So, grab it, make your life easier. Oh, I should note there’s a plugin for IE that’s supposed to do about the same thing, but I didn’t have much luck with it, which sucks, because I use IE more than I do firefox, though between LiveHTTPHeaders and the Web Developer Toolbar, that’s changing.

I’m curious… did this solve a problem for you? Do you already use this, or something else? What do you guys use?