Handling multiple SIP headers with the same name in Kamailio

The SIP RFC allows for multiple SIP headers to have the same name,

For example, it’s very common to have lots of Via headers present in a request.

In Kamailio, we often may wish to add headers, view the contents of headers and perform an action or re-write headers (Disclaimer about not rewriting Vias as that goes beyond the purview of a SIP Proxy but whatever).

Let’s look at a use case where we have multiple instances of the X-NickTest: header, looking something like this:

INVITE sip:[email protected]:5061 SIP/2.0
X-NickTest: ENTRY ONE
X-NickTest: ENTRY TWO
X-NickTest: ENTRY THREE
...

Let’s look at how we’d access this inside Kamailio.

First, we could just use the psedovariable for header – $hdr()

xlog("Value of X-NickTest is: $hdr(X-NickTest)");

But this would just result in the first entry being printed out:

Value of X-NickTest is: ENTRY ONE

If we know how many instances there are of the header, we can access it by it’s id in the array, for example:

xlog("Value of first X-NickTest is: $hdr(X-NickTest)[0]");
xlog("Value of second X-NickTest is: $hdr(X-NickTest)[1]");
xlog("Value of third  X-NickTest is: $hdr(X-NickTest)[2]");

But we may not know how many to expect either, but we can find out using $hdrc(name) to get the number of headers returned.

xlog("X-NickTest has $hdrc(X-NickTest) entries");

You’re probably seeing where I’m going with this, the next logical step is to loop through them, which we can also do something like this:

$var(i) = 0;
while($var(i) < $hdrc(X-NickTest)) {
         xlog(X-NickTest entry [$var(i)] has value $hdrc(X-NickTest)[$var(i)]);
         $var(i) = $var(i) + 1;
}

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *