How to Convert HTTP Headers and Cookies into Python Dictionaries Without Newlines

1. Introduction

A Python enthusiast asked how to convert raw HTTP request headers and cookies into dictionary format, but the resulting dictionary contained unwanted newline characters.

2. Implementation

Several suggestions were offered:

Replace the "\n" sequence before splitting the string.

Use a custom delimiter and dict(map(lambda x: x.split('@#%'), ...)) to build the dictionary.

Convert the header block to JSON by replacing ":\n" with ":\"" and newlines with ",\"", then wrap with braces and load with json.loads.

Example code using the JSON approach:

import json

s = ''
authority:
www.qcc.com
method:
GET
path:
/web/search?key=海王
scheme:
https
Accept:
text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7
Accept-Encoding:
gzip, deflate, br, zstd
... (other headers) ...
User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/125.0.0.0''

s = s.replace('"', '').replace(':
', '":"').replace('
', '","')
s = '{"' + s + '"}'
s = json.loads(s)
print(s)

An alternative is to use eval(s) if the JSON library is not desired.

Images illustrating the problem and the final header structure are included below:

3. Conclusion

The community successfully transformed the raw header string into a clean Python dictionary, demonstrating practical techniques for handling newline characters and leveraging JSON conversion for HTTP header parsing.