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.
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) )
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD treat it as type "application/octet-stream".
Entity Body Length
7.2.2 Entity Length
The entity-length of a message is the length of the message-body before any transfer-codings have been applied. Section 4.4 defines how the transfer-length of a message-body is determined.