Re: Character encoding of HTTP requests and responses

> The headers are in a fairly stereotyped form that is always restricted to
> US-ASCII, with the exception of some headers that can contain free text. I
> think text in headers is assumed to be in ISO-8859-1. I _think_ that text
> in other character encodings can be represented as via and encoding defined
> in RFC 1522 and RFC 2047, but you have to read the grammer to see where
> this is allowed.


       draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-rev-01
has details, namely:

>        The TEXT rule is only used for descriptive field contents and values
>        that are not intended to be interpreted by the message parser. Words of
>        *TEXT may contain characters from character sets other than ISO 8859-1
>        [22] only when encoded according to the rules of RFC 2047 [14].

TEXT is used in quoted text, mainly, but there are few text fields in
HTTP headers. ("Warning" headers for example, have text.)

Larry
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Saturday, 6 December 1997 01:34:26 UTC