Transfer-Encoding
The Transfer-Encoding
header specifies the form of
encoding used to safely transfer the payload body to the
user.
Note: HTTP/2 doesn't support HTTP 1.1's chunked transfer encoding mechanism, as it provides its own, more efficient, mechanisms for data streaming.
Transfer-Encoding
is a hop-by-hop header, that is applied to a
message between two nodes, not to a resource itself. Each segment of a multi-node
connection can use different Transfer-Encoding
values. If you want to
compress data over the whole connection, use the end-to-end
Content-Encoding
header instead.
When present on a response to a HEAD
request that has no body, it
indicates the value that would have applied to the corresponding GET
message.
Header type | Request header, Response header, Payload header |
---|---|
Forbidden header name | yes |
Syntax
Transfer-Encoding: chunked Transfer-Encoding: compress Transfer-Encoding: deflate Transfer-Encoding: gzip // Several values can be listed, separated by a comma Transfer-Encoding: gzip, chunked
Directives
chunked
-
Data is sent in a series of chunks. The
Content-Length
header is omitted in this case and at the beginning of each chunk you need to add the length of the current chunk in hexadecimal format, followed by '\r\n
' and then the chunk itself, followed by another '\r\n
'. The terminating chunk is a regular chunk, with the exception that its length is zero. It is followed by the trailer, which consists of a (possibly empty) sequence of header fields. compress
-
A format using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm. The value name was taken from the UNIX compress program, which implemented this algorithm. Like the compress program, which has disappeared from most UNIX distributions, this content-encoding is used by almost no browsers today, partly because of a patent issue (which expired in 2003).
deflate
-
Using the zlib structure (defined in RFC 1950), with the deflate compression algorithm (defined in RFC 1951).
gzip
-
A format using the Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77), with a 32-bit CRC. This is originally the format of the UNIX gzip program. The HTTP/1.1 standard also recommends that the servers supporting this content-encoding should recognize
x-gzip
as an alias, for compatibility purposes.
Examples
Chunked encoding
Chunked encoding is useful when larger amounts of data are sent to the client and the total size of the response may not be known until the request has been fully processed. For example, when generating a large HTML table resulting from a database query or when transmitting large images. A chunked response looks like this:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/plain Transfer-Encoding: chunked 7\r\n Mozilla\r\n 9\r\n Developer\r\n 7\r\n Network\r\n 0\r\n \r\n
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing # header.transfer-encoding |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser
See also
Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding
Content-Length
-
Header fields that regulate the use of trailers:
TE
(requests) andTrailer
(responses). - Chunked transfer encoding