hi friends ,i have some problems with the HTTP protocol , scually am not very familiar with HTTP , but i developed a software which has an option of retrieving webpage source code , but some pages are 401 forbidden , i tried to see the data that IE sends to the server when i input a username and password , acually i found that it just sends a normal GET request without any existance of a username or a password !!! can any one help me with this ? my question is how can i send a username and password to a 401 forbidden page , thank you .

Usually what is being asked for it HTTP basic authentication. Your program will need to sent an Authorization: HTTP header, assuming you know the username and password. Take a look at the example on the Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication

Regards,
Jimbob

[quote author=teamer link=topic=2641.msg12197#msg12197
how you will know if that web resource would send you a 401 page or a normal 200 page if you didn't send the normal GET headers first !.
[/quote]
What happens is you send the normal GET request and the web servers sends back a 401 response. In the response headers there is information about the authenication required to access the page. If I access my home ADSL router for example I get offered Basic and Digest authentication for the realm SpeedTouch.


This is how your web browser knows to prompt you for a username and password. When your browser receives the WWW-Authenticate header it prompts you for a username and password which it then sends along with the next request.

Jimbob