HTTP Content-Length Header | Generated by AI
The unit of the Content-Length header in the HTTP protocol is bytes.
In HTTP, the Content-Length header is used to indicate the size of the response body that the server is sending to the client. This size is specified as a decimal number representing the number of bytes (or octets, where one octet equals 8 bits) in the message body. According to the HTTP/1.1 specification (RFC 7230, Section 3.3.2), the Content-Length header field explicitly states the size of the message body in octets, which confirms that the unit is bytes.
For example, in the provided case where the header is 'content-length': '130700923', this means the response body is 130,700,923 bytes long. To give a sense of scale, this is approximately 124.6 megabytes (MB), since 1 MB is roughly 1,048,576 bytes (2^20 bytes). This is a plausible size for a large file or data transfer in an HTTP response.
To clarify further:
- The value is an integer, not a fractional number, ruling out units like kilobytes or megabytes directly.
- In HTTP, the body is transmitted as a sequence of bytes, and Content-Length corresponds to the exact number of bytes the client should expect.
- Even in other versions like HTTP/2, where framing is used instead of a single Content-Length header, the payload size is still measured in bytes.
Thus, the unit of Content-Length in the HTTP protocol is unequivocally bytes.