HTTP header Transfer-Encoding

The Transfer-Encoding header specifies the form of encoding used to safely transfer the payload body to the user.

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
deflate
gzip

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
11\r\n
Developer Network\r\n
0\r\n
\r\n