OK, I Knew That!

Previously...

• I identified a problem where the megaphone_socket process was not being started.
• I identified a problem where data was going into ejabberd_http but not coming out.
• I discovered that ejabberd_http was expecting parsed data.

Some days, writing this blog stinks.  Some days, it stinks a lot.

I was trying to figure out how it was that parsed data was coming back from from the following call:

    Data = SockMod:recv(Socket, 0, 300000),

I put a debugging statement nearby and discovered that the value of SockMod was gen_tcp.  I looked at the code.  There did not appear to be anything between that statement and the bit that expecting the value of Data to be a tuple.

I looked at the code.  I looked at the debug output.  I searched through the source again.

The thing is, gen_tcp is a standard erlang module.  There is no way, thought I, that a standard library could be parsing HTTP.  

Wrong-o.

It turns out that the standard library can be put into a mode where it does some HTTP parsing.  For example, to do stuff like returning

{ok, {http_header, integer, HeaderName, <reserved>, HttpString}}

Of course I did not realize this when I set out to perform my simple, contained, relatively easy project, I had not realized that I would have to do something like this.

Sigh

So next steps...

• Parse out the various types of HTTP results that ejabberd_http cares about.
• Drink...heavily.
• Not necessarily in that order.