Parsing a HTTP request

I'm currently writing a pure ruby webserver, and one of the things that I have to do is parse a HTTP request. The method I've pasted below takes a HTTP request, and puts it in a map keyed by the header field names.

The biggest issue I faced while doing this was dealing with the lack of an EOF from the TCPSocket on requests with bodies (basically every POST request). This meant that I couldn't just keep doing file.gets until I reached the end of the file, because there was no end. What I ended up doing instead, was to create a while true loop that breaks when it finds '\r\n', which are the last characters before the Body, then read the Body separately using the number I get from Content-length.

Is there a more elegant way in ruby to do this? I feel like it's unnecessary to use a infinite loop, but I can't think of anything else that would work.

# Takes a HTTP request and parses it into a map that's keyed
   # by the title of the heading and the heading itself.
   # Request should always be a TCPSocket object.
   def self.parse_http_request(request)
      headers = {}

      #get the first heading (first line)
      headers['Heading'] = request.gets.gsub /^"|"$/, ''.chomp
      method = headers['Heading'].split(' ')[0]

      #parse the header
      while true
         #do inspect to get the escape characters as literals
         #also remove quotes
         line = request.gets.inspect.gsub /^"|"$/, ''

         #if the line only contains a newline, then the body is about to start
         break if line.eql? '\r\n'

         label = line[0..line.index(':')-1]

         #get rid of the escape characters
         val = line[line.index(':')+1..line.length].tap{|val|val.slice!('\r\n')}.strip
         headers[label] = val
      end 

      #If it's a POST, then we need to get the body
      if method.eql?('POST')
         headers['Body'] = request.read(headers['Content-Length'].to_i) 
      end 

      return headers
   end

I don't know if this is the best method to parse an HTTP request. You probably should have a look into one of the simpler ruby http servers out there to get some ideas. I do know though that you're doing some strange things here:

headers['Heading'] = request.gets.gsub /^"|"$/, ''.chomp

It looks like you're calling the #chomp method on '' here, which doesn't make sense. You really should use parenthesis here:

headers['Heading'] = request.gets.gsub(/^"|"$/, '').chomp

But on the other hand I can't see what the gsub is doing here, you probably can just get rid of it.

method = headers['Heading'].split(' ')[0]

Probably nitpicking but you can make this easier (and a little faster) by using:

method = headers['Heading'][/[^ ]*/]

That translates to: get the substring till the first space character (so no need to create an array here).

line = request.gets.inspect.gsub /^"|"$/, ''

That is really strange, you don't need to "inspect" a string just to parse control characters. You can match control characters with double quoted strings (e.g. "\r\n").

label = line[0..line.index(':')-1]

#get rid of the escape characters
val = line[line.index(':')+1..line.length].tap{|val|val.slice!('\r\n')}.strip

The ruby god weeps. You can make this much simpler (and more efficient) by using a regexp here:

line =~ /(.*?): (.*)/
label = $1
val = $2.strip

Modifying the stream inside #tap is bad style and the #strip removes surrounding whitespace like "\n" and "\r" anyway.

For the loop you can do the most natural thing and just write the break condition in the while condition part:

while (line = request.gets) != "\r\n"
  ...
end

StackExchange Code Review Q#30014, answer score: 3