How does a HTTP/1.1 client know where a message ends in presence of `Connection: keep-alive` header field but absence of `Content-Length`?

Question

In particular, I have this response header from an nginx server:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 10:28:24 GMT Content-Type: text/html Last-Modified: Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:50:21 GMT Connection: keep-alive ETag: W/"56a9f26d-2d97" Content-Encoding: gzip

Followed by some 3352 Bytes of compressed data. I'm trying to find out how does the client know where the body of this message ends and a new response begins.

I think gzip contains the size in the header

Ed Heal
– Ed Heal

2018-03-20 13:16:14 +00:00
Commented Mar 20, 2018 at 13:16 — Ed Heal
– Ed Heal, Commented Mar 20, 2018 at 13:16

Julian Reschke · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-20 20:35:56Z

1

It doesn't. The response requires either a Content-Length response header field, or it has to use "Transfer-Encoding: chunked".

answered Mar 20, 2018 at 20:35

Julian Reschke

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1 Comment

Peter Jankuliak Over a year ago

You're right. I generated the above HTTP header with curl -I <URL> (which sends the HEAD request) instead of curl -sD - <URL> -o /dev/null and so the response was missing the Transfer-Encoding: chunked header field.

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