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Re: "Browser tracing"?

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel-curl_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 08:27:41 +0100 (CET)

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Keith E Junker wrote:

> I have a problem whose solution would be so simple if only my browser could
> produce a trace. Is there a GUI browser that takes a --tracelevel=N option?
> I can't even figure out whether what I'm trying to do in curl needs to be
> application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data.

Let me point out one of the most useful tools available:

        http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/

Of course this requires that you run Mozilla (or possibly Netscape 7, I don't
know). But it allows displaying both incoming and outgoing HTTP headers and
makes replaying them with curl to a kid's play.

> Trying to reverse engineer an https: transaction would turn into a piece of
> cake if there were such a browser. Because of the frames in our problem
> management thin client, saving pages and changing POSTs to GETs just takes
> too long and it's too error-prone when I'm trying to do it during work hours
> - it's sort of "peripheral" work, you know.

I don't know why you would need to try GET vs POST. You should get the first
page with curl, then read the HTML and adjust the curl command for the
following page(s).

The tricky parts are usually things like javascript fiddling, cookies and
weird redirect attempts in order to detect browser versions and javascript
compliance.

> Another approach would be to do packet capture and use OpenSSL to decrypt a
> session.

ssldump (http://www.rtfm.com/ssldump/) might help you do just that.

> Just started using curl a week and a half ago and I'm quite impressed with
> the power of this tool.

Thanks. We have spent a little time on its development! ;-)

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- http://curl.haxx.se/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/
   [[ Do not send mails to this email address. They won't reach me. ]]
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Received on 2004-01-27