Content-length and other HTTP headers?

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Does it give me any advantage if I set this header when generating normal HTML pages?

I see that some frameworks out there will set this header property and I was wondering why... (Along with other headers, like Content-Type: text/html)

Does browser load the site faster or smoother?

ps: they do it like:

ob_start();

... stuff here...

$content = ob_get_contents();
$length = strlen($content);

header('Content-Length: '.$length);

echo $content;

Answers

I think its only because of the HTTP Spec says to do this in every case possible.

Applications SHOULD use this field to indicate the transfer-length of the message-body, unless this is prohibited by the rules in section 4.4.

You can also look at Pauls Answer on the Question of Deaomon.

I think this will answer yours too.

Also you should use Content-Length if you want someone download a file with another header: e.g.

<?php
$file = "original.pdf"
$size = filesize($file);
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
header("Content-length: $size");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');
readfile($file);
?>

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

caglar

The function get_headers() may be the one you are looking for.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-headers.php

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

steve_weller

You can separate the header from the the body by splitting up on a double linebreak. It should be <CRLF><CRLF> so this would normally work:

list($header, $body) = explode("rnrn", $response, 2);

More reliably you should use a regex to catch linebreak variations (super unlikely to ever happen):

list($header, $body) = preg_split("/RR/", $response, 2);

The thing with the 4d and 0 is called the chunked encoding. (It's hex-numbers separated with another linebreak, and inidicate the length of the following raw content block).

To clear that up you have to look at the headers first, and see if there is an according Transfer-Encoding: entry. This is were it gets complicated, and advisable to use one of the myriad of existing HTTP userland processing classes. PEAR has one.

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

isaacparrot

rfc2616

The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the entity-body, in decimal number of OCTETs, sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.

It doesn't matter what the content-type is.

Extension at post below.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

patrick_tescher

Did you try request.headers["content-length"] ?

Saturday, October 1, 2022

codeofnode

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Content-length and other HTTP headers?

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