HTTP Entity
External
- RFC 2616 Entity https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec7.html
Internal
Overview
The HTTP request/response may optionally transfer an entity. An entity consists of entity header fields, which are grouped together with the other headers of the request or response, and an entity-body. The HTTP protocol requires that requests/response which include a body either use chunked transfer encoding or send a Content-Length request header.
Entity Headers
Entity Body
The entity body (if any) sent with the HTTP request/response is in a format and encoding defined by the entity headers. The entity body is obtained from the message body by applying the inverse of the transfer encoding, as specified by Transfer-Encoding, if any.
Entity Body Type
When an entity body is included with a message, the data type of that body is determined from the entity header fields Content-Type and Content-Encoding. These define a two-layer, ordered encoding model:
entity-body = Content-Encoding(Content-Type(data))
Entity Body Length
The length of a entity is the length of the message body before any transfer encodings have been applied.