Entity Header: What It Is, How It Works & How to Use It

An entity header is an HTTP header that describes the payload of an HTTP message (i.e. metadata about the message body). Entity headers include: Content-Length , Content-Language , Content-Encoding , Content-Type , Expires , etc. Entity headers may be present in both HTTP request and response messages.

In the following example, Content-Length is an entity header, while Host and User-Agent are requests headers:

http

                                    
                                        
                                            POST
                                            
                                                
                                                    /
                                                    myform.html
                                                
                                            
                                            HTTP/1.1
                                        
                                        
                                            Host
                                            :
                                            developer.mozilla.org
                                        
                                        
                                            User-Agent
                                            :
                                            Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
                                        
                                        
                                            Content-Length
                                            :
                                            128

Entity Header

See also