HTTP::Negotiate(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation HTTP::Negotiate(3)
NAME
HTTP::Negotiate - choose a variant to serve
SYNOPSIS
use HTTP::Negotiate qw(choose);
# ID QS Content-Type Encoding Char-Set Lang Size
$variants =
[['var1', 1.000, 'text/html', undef, 'iso-8859-1', 'en', 3000],
['var2', 0.950, 'text/plain', 'gzip', 'us-ascii', 'no', 400],
['var3', 0.3, 'image/gif', undef, undef, undef, 43555],
];
@prefered = choose($variants, $request_headers);
$the_one = choose($variants);
DESCRIPTION
This module provides a complete implementation of the HTTP content negotiation algorithm specified in
draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00.ps chapter 12. Content negotiation allows for the selection of a
preferred content representation based upon attributes of the negotiable variants and the value of
the various Accept* header fields in the request.
The variants are ordered by preference by calling the function choose().
The first parameter is reference to an array of the variants to choose among. Each element in this
array is an array with the values [$id, $qs, $content_type, $content_encoding, $charset,
$content_language, $content_length] whose meanings are described below. The $content_encoding and
$content_language can be either a single scalar value or an array reference if there are several
values.
The second optional parameter is either a HTTP::Headers or a HTTP::Request object which is searched
for "Accept*" headers. If this parameter is missing, then the accept specification is initialized
from the CGI environment variables HTTP_ACCEPT, HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET, HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING and
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE.
In an array context, choose() returns a list of [variant identifier, calculated quality, size]
tuples. The values are sorted by quality, highest quality first. If the calculated quality is the
same for two variants, then they are sorted by size (smallest first). E.g.:
(['var1', 1, 2000], ['var2', 0.3, 512], ['var3', 0.3, 1024]);
Note that also zero quality variants are included in the return list even if these should never be
served to the client.
In a scalar context, it returns the identifier of the variant with the highest score or "undef" if
none have non-zero quality.
If the $HTTP::Negotiate::DEBUG variable is set to TRUE, then a lot of noise is generated on STDOUT
during evaluation of choose().
VARIANTS
A variant is described by a list of the following values. If the attribute does not make sense or is
unknown for a variant, then use "undef" instead.
identifier
This is a string that you use as the name for the variant. This identifier for the preferred
variants returned by choose().
qs This is a number between 0.000 and 1.000 that describes the "source quality". This is what
draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00.ps says about this value:
Source quality is measured by the content provider as representing the amount of degradation from
the original source. For example, a picture in JPEG form would have a lower qs when translated to
the XBM format, and much lower qs when translated to an ASCII-art representation. Note, however,
that this is a function of the source - an original piece of ASCII-art may degrade in quality if
it is captured in JPEG form. The qs values should be assigned to each variant by the content
provider; if no qs value has been assigned, the default is generally "qs=1".
content-type
This is the media type of the variant. The media type does not include a charset attribute, but
might contain other parameters. Examples are:
text/html
text/html;version=2.0
text/plain
image/gif
image/jpg
content-encoding
This is one or more content encodings that has been applied to the variant. The content encoding
is generally used as a modifier to the content media type. The most common content encodings are:
gzip
compress
content-charset
This is the character set used when the variant contains text. The charset value should generally
be "undef" or one of these:
us-ascii
iso-8859-1 ... iso-8859-9
iso-2022-jp
iso-2022-jp-2
iso-2022-kr
unicode-1-1
unicode-1-1-utf-7
unicode-1-1-utf-8
content-language
This describes one or more languages that are used in the variant. Language is described like
this in draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00.ps: A language is in this context a natural language spoken,
written, or otherwise conveyed by human beings for communication of information to other human
beings. Computer languages are explicitly excluded.
The language tags are defined by RFC 3066. Examples are:
no Norwegian
en International English
en-US US English
en-cockney
content-length
This is the number of bytes used to represent the content.
ACCEPT HEADERS
The following Accept* headers can be used for describing content preferences in a request (This
description is an edited extract from draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00.ps):
Accept
This header can be used to indicate a list of media ranges which are acceptable as a response to
the request. The "*" character is used to group media types into ranges, with "*/*" indicating
all media types and "type/*" indicating all subtypes of that type.
The parameter q is used to indicate the quality factor, which represents the user's preference for
that range of media types. The parameter mbx gives the maximum acceptable size of the response
content. The default values are: q=1 and mbx=infinity. If no Accept header is present, then the
client accepts all media types with q=1.
For example:
Accept: audio/*;q=0.2;mbx=200000, audio/basic
would mean: "I prefer audio/basic (of any size), but send me any audio type if it is the best
available after an 80% mark-down in quality and its size is less than 200000 bytes"
Accept-Charset
Used to indicate what character sets are acceptable for the response. The "us-ascii" character
set is assumed to be acceptable for all user agents. If no Accept-Charset field is given, the
default is that any charset is acceptable. Example:
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, unicode-1-1
Accept-Encoding
Restricts the Content-Encoding values which are acceptable in the response. If no Accept-Encoding
field is present, the server may assume that the client will accept any content encoding. An
empty Accept-Encoding means that no content encoding is acceptable. Example:
Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip
Accept-Language
This field is similar to Accept, but restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred in
a response. Each language may be given an associated quality value which represents an estimate
of the user's comprehension of that language. For example:
Accept-Language: no, en-gb;q=0.8, de;q=0.55
would mean: "I prefer Norwegian, but will accept British English (with 80% comprehension) or
German (with 55% comprehension).
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1996,2001 Gisle Aas.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl
itself.
AUTHOR
Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no>
perl v5.8.8 2005-12-07 HTTP::Negotiate(3)
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