HTTP Pocket Reference

Name

Transfer-Encoding: encoding_type

Synopsis

The Transfer-Encoding header specifies that the message is encoded. This is not the same as content-encoding (an entity-body header, discussed later), since transfer-encodings are a property of the message, not of the entity-body. For example:

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

In the HTTP 1.1 specification, chunked is the only encoding method supported.

The chunked transfer-encoding encodes the message as a series of chunks followed by entity-headers, as shown in Figure 1.6. The chunks and entity-headers are in a client’s request entity-body or server response entity-body. Each chunk contains a chunk size specified in base 16, followed by CRLF. After that, the chunk body, whose length is specified in the chunk size, is presented, followed by a CRLF. Consecutive chunks are specified one after another, with the last chunk having a length of zero followed by CRLF. Entity-headers follow the chunks, terminated by a CRLF on a line by itself.

Figure 1.6. Chunked transfer encoding