AkousaHTTP Header Parser
Parse and analyze HTTP request or response headers.
About HTTP Header Parser
The HTTP Header Parser tokenizes and structures raw HTTP/1.1 request or response headers into a clean name/value table with inline documentation for over 60 standard headers including security headers (Content-Security-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Frame-Options), cache directives (Cache-Control, ETag, Vary), authentication headers (Authorization, WWW-Authenticate), and CORS headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin). HTTP headers control virtually every aspect of web request behavior, and reading them accurately is essential for debugging caching, CORS, security policy, and content negotiation issues.
How to Use
Paste raw HTTP headers copied from browser DevTools Network tab, cURL verbose output, Wireshark HTTP stream, or any HTTP proxy tool into the input field. The parser splits each line at the first colon, trims whitespace, and displays headers in a structured table with a description of each header's purpose and effect. Multi-value headers like Accept, Set-Cookie, and Vary are parsed individually. Click any header row to see detailed documentation for that specific header.
Common Use Cases
- Backend developers diagnosing CORS preflight failures by parsing the full Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Methods, and Access-Control-Allow-Headers response headers from a failing cross-origin request
- DevOps and security engineers auditing HTTP security header configurations — checking for Strict-Transport-Security max-age, Content-Security-Policy directives, and X-Content-Type-Options presence on production endpoints
- Frontend developers debugging cache behavior by parsing Cache-Control directives, ETag values, Last-Modified timestamps, and Vary header values to understand why responses are not being cached correctly
- API integration developers inspecting rate-limiting headers, pagination tokens, and authentication challenge headers from third-party API responses to understand service constraints
- Security researchers analyzing HTTP response headers from target applications to identify server fingerprints, missing security headers, and misconfigured Content-Security-Policy directives during web application assessments