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, 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.