HTTP Entity

External

• RFC 2616 Entity https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec7.html

Internal

• HTTP
• HTTP Request
• HTTP Response

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 Headers

Entity Body

Message Body: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html#sec4.3

Entity Body: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec7.html#sec7.2

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.