Re: HTTP entity length

>> How to determine the length of the message body is the (exhaustive)
>> subject of section 4.4 of rfc 2616.
>
>Thanks !
>
>I have gone through that part of the RFC and now a question arises to me.
>Suppose the following case:
>
>A- Our message includes a message-body, which means that condition 1 in
>section 4.4 is false, and
>B- There is no Transfer-Encoding, which means that condition 2 in 4.4 is
>false, and
>C- There is no Content-Length field, which means that condition 3 in 4.4 is
>false (note that this is possible since from section 14.13 we have that
>applications SHOULD (only SHOULD) use this field to indicate the
>transfer-length when it is not prohibited by rules in section 4.4) and
>D- The content-type is not "multipart/byteranges", which means that
>condition 4 in 4.4 is false, and
>E- The server is not closing the connection, which means that condition 5
>is false.
>
>I think that according to the RFC the previous situation may happen and, if

No, it cannot.  The specification says "one of the following".  There is
no option beyond that.  The server will eventually close the connection
and thereby will end the body.  The RFC is making a factual statement.

....Roy

Received on Wednesday, 2 February 2000 11:31:33 UTC