Is the Content-Length header required for a HTTP/1.0 response?

by

Section 10.4 of the spec (which you linked to) doesn’t say anything about requirements on responses itself, but instead links to section 7.2.2, which specifies that the server can indicate the length of a response containing an entity body by

  • sending a Content-Length header, or
  • closing the connection when the entire response has been sent.

Section 7.2 says that responses to HEAD requests, and 1xx, 204 or 304 responses, should not include an entity body, and therefore need not include a Content-Length header; and

All other responses must include an entity body or a Content-Length header field defined with a value of zero (0).

So to answer the question: When no Content-Length is received, the client keeps reading until the server closes the connection.

More Related Contents:

  1. application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data?
  2. Are HTTP headers case-sensitive?
  3. Maximum on HTTP header values?
  4. Custom HTTP headers : naming conventions
  5. What’s the difference between Cache-Control: max-age=0 and no-cache?
  6. Uses of content-disposition in an HTTP response header
  7. ‘Refresh’ HTTP header
  8. Difference between Pragma and Cache-Control headers?
  9. Detecting the character encoding of an HTTP POST request
  10. What are all the possible values for HTTP “Content-Type” header?
  11. Ideal HTTP cache control headers for different types of resources
  12. Remove http referer
  13. HTTP Range header
  14. Content-Length header with HEAD requests?
  15. Why is Cache-Control attribute sent in request header (client to server)?
  16. How to forward headers on HTTP redirect
  17. How does “304 Not Modified” work exactly?
  18. What is q=0.5 in Accept* HTTP headers?
  19. What is Cache-Control: private?
  20. Standard for adding multiple values of a single HTTP Header to a request or response
  21. What is a full specification of X-Forwarded-Proto HTTP header?
  22. Setting HTTP headers
  23. What HTTP response headers are required
  24. what characters are allowed in HTTP header values?
  25. What is HTTP “Host” header?
  26. How to evaluate http response codes from bash/shell script?
  27. What does HTTP/1.1 302 mean exactly?
  28. HTTP Cache Control max-age, must-revalidate
  29. Avoid caching of the http responses
  30. Keep-alive header clarification

Leave a Comment