html form multipart,html - Example of multipart/form-data - Stack Overflow

EDIT: I am maintaining a similar, but more in-depth answer at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28380690/895245

To see exactly what is happening, use nc -l or an ECHO server and an user agent like a browser or cURL.

Save the form to an .html file:

Submit

Create files to upload:

echo 'Content of a.txt.' > a.txt

echo '

Content of a.html.' > a.html

Run:

nc -l localhost 8000

Open the HTML on your browser, select the files and click on submit and check the terminal.

nc prints the request received. Firefox sent:

POST / HTTP/1.1

Host: localhost:8000

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Cookie: __atuvc=34%7C7; permanent=0; _gitlab_session=226ad8a0be43681acf38c2fab9497240; __profilin=p%3Dt; request_method=GET

Connection: keep-alive

Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------9051914041544843365972754266

Content-Length: 554

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="text"

text default

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="a.txt"

Content-Type: text/plain

Content of a.txt.

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file2"; filename="a.html"

Content-Type: text/html

Content of a.html.

-----------------------------9051914041544843365972754266--

Aternativelly, cURL should send the same POST request as your a browser form:

nc -l localhost 8000

curl -F "text=default" -F "file1=@a.html" -F "file1=@a.txt" localhost:8000

You can do multiple tests with:

while true; do printf '' | nc -l localhost 8000; done