Re: P1: Content-Length SHOULD be sent

On Nov 26, 2012, at 9:21 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Currently, p1 says:
> 
>> When a message is allowed to contain a message body, does not have a Transfer-Encoding header field, and has a payload body length that is known to the sender before the message header section has been sent, the sender should send a Content-Length header field to indicate the length of the payload body as a decimal number of octets.
> 
> This unqualified SHOULD leads people to convoluted readings of the spec where Content-Length is required to be sent on a GET request:
>  https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/223#issuecomment-10745532
> 
> Proposal:
> 
>> When a message is allowed to contain a body, does not have a Transfer-Encoding header field, and has a payload body length that is known to the sender before the message header section has been sent, the sender should send a Content-Length header field to indicate the length of the payload body as a decimal number of octets, unless the message is a request and the payload length is zero (in which case the Content-Length header MAY be sent). 

That would be incorrect, so I don't see why it is being suggested.
Try it with POST on a valid CGI script and it will result in a
parser failure (if not a segfault).

....Roy