Chunked transfer encoding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chunked transfer encoding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chunked transfer encoding is a data transfer mechanism in version 1.1 of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in which a web server serves content in a series of chunks. It uses the Transfer-Encoding HTTP response header in place of the Content-Length header, which the protocol would otherwise require. Because the Content-Length header is not used, the server does not need to know the length of the content before it starts transmitting a response to the client (usually a web browser). Web servers can begin transmitting responses with dynamically-generated content before knowing the total size of that content. The size of each chunk is sent right before the chunk itself so that a client can tell when it has finished receiving data for that chunk. The data transfer is terminated by a final chunk of length zero.