Are the chunk sizes in an HTTP response with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked", significant to protocols that sit on top of HTTP?

Question

Does anything carried inside HTTP care about chunk sizes? Some sort of RPC protocol perhaps?

EDIT: Here's the Wikipedia sample response

Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:22:21 GMT

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

23
This is the data in the first chunk

1A
and this is the second one

0

The response could have easily been chopped up into chunks of sizes different from 23 and 1A. Is there a case where chunk boundaries may be significant?

Is there ay other way on the clinet side to make sure it received all the data? — Julien, Mar 30 '09 at 23:53

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '09 at 00:13

4

None that I know of. It would be against the spirit of HTTP if not an outright bug.

answered Mar 31 '09 at 00:13

bobince

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That makes sense I guess. I suppose it is conceivable that chunk boundaries may be used to delimit some higher level protocol, but it would require both sides to agree. – sigjuice Mar 31 '09 at 15:03
1

Yeah, a protocol could in theory do that, but it'd be pretty bogus since the usual purpose of layering things over HTTP is to abstract this stuff away. I would be surprised if this actually happened (other than unintentionally due to poor implementation). – bobince Mar 31 '09 at 15:32

Are the chunk sizes in an HTTP response with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked", significant to protocols that sit on top of HTTP?

1 Answers1