Multipart Form-Data Conformance Test Suite

⚠️ EARLY ALPHA - DO NOT USE

This test suite is in very early development and has not been verified against real-world implementations. The test cases, expected results, and tooling may contain errors. Do not rely on this for validating parser conformance until it has been thoroughly reviewed and tested.

A language-independent test suite for validating HTTP multipart/form-data parsers and generators.

Goals

1. Language-independent - Raw binary test files with JSON metadata
2. Bidirectional - Test both parsing and generation
3. Comprehensive - Cover spec requirements, edge cases, and browser variations
4. Self-describing - Each test case explains what it's testing

Quick Start

Running Tests Against Your Implementation

1. Iterate through test directories in tests/
2. For each test:
   • Read headers.json to get the Content-Type header with boundary
   • Read input.raw as binary data (the HTTP request body)
   • Parse using your implementation
   • Compare results against expected in test.json

Test Case Structure

Each test case is a directory containing:

tests/category/NNN-test-name/
├── test.json      # Metadata and expected results
├── headers.json   # HTTP headers (Content-Type with boundary)
└── input.raw      # Raw HTTP body bytes (binary)

Test Categories

File Formats

test.json

{
  "id": "001-single-text-field",
  "name": "Single text field",
  "description": "Basic test with one text form field",
  "spec_references": ["RFC 7578 Section 4.2"],
  "category": "basic",
  "tags": ["required", "parsing"],
  "expected": {
    "valid": true,
    "parts": [
      {
        "name": "username",
        "filename": null,
        "content_type": null,
        "body_text": "john_doe"
      }
    ]
  }
}

headers.json

{
  "content-type": "multipart/form-data; boundary=----TestBoundary123"
}

input.raw

Binary file containing exact HTTP body bytes. Use a hex editor or the provided tools to inspect.

Tools

• tools/generate-raw.py - Create .raw files programmatically
• tools/validate-suite.py - Validate test suite integrity
• tools/run-reference.py - Reference parser implementation

Spec References

• RFC 7578 - Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data
• RFC 2046 - MIME Part Two: Media Types (multipart definition)
• RFC 5987 - Character Set and Language Encoding (filename*)
• HTML Living Standard - Form submission

License

This test suite is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.