TCP/IP Guide

HTTP Entity Headers

Last, but not least, we come to the fourth group of HTTP headers: entity headers. These headers provide information about the resource carried in the body of an HTTP message, called an entity in the HTTP standards. They serve the overall purpose of conveying to the recipient of a message the information it needs to properly process and display the entity, such as its type and encoding method.

The most common type of entity is a file or another set of information that has been requested by a client, and for this reason, entity headers most often appear in HTTP Response messages. However, they can also appear in HTTP Request messages, especially those using the PUT and POST methods, which are the ones that transfer data from a ...