Re: Termination of POST body

William Perry (wmperry@spry.com)
Tue, 26 Sep 95 05:58 PDT


Paul Phillips writes:
> Netscape/X and Mosaic/X terminate POST bodies with an extra \r\n. My
> server has been reading all data available on the socket, which means
> that the number of bytes sent to a CGI's stdin is two greater than the
> supplied content length.
>
> The spec tells me in section 7.2.2 "... the length of that body may be
> determined in one of several ways. If a Content-Length header field is
> present, its value in bytes represents [the length]. Otherwise, the body
> length is determined by the Content-Type (for types with an explicit
> end-of-body delimiter) [...]"
>
> If content-length is supplied, I can use that; no problem. If it is not,
> it appears that the "end-of-body delimiter" is the only mechanism for
> determining the end of the entity body. This appears to be \r\n based on
> these clients' behavior. Is this so?
>
> Or, do all clients in normal use supply content-length, and this is a
> non-issue?

I've never run across a client that didn't send content-length.

-Bill P.