chunked

Data is sent in a series of chunks. The Content-Length header is omitted in this case and at the beginning of each chunk you need to add the length of the current chunk in hexadecimal format, followed by '\r\n' and then the chunk itself, followed by another '\r\n'. The terminating chunk is a regular chunk, with the exception that its length is zero. It is followed by the trailer, which consists of a (possibly empty) sequence of header fields.

compress

A format using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm. The value name was taken from the UNIX compress program, which implemented this algorithm. Like the compress program, which has disappeared from most UNIX distributions, this content-encoding is used by almost no browsers today, partly because of a patent issue (which expired in 2003).

deflate

Using the zlib structure (defined in RFC 1950), with the deflate compression algorithm (defined in RFC 1951).

gzip

A format using the Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77), with a 32-bit CRC. This is originally the format of the UNIX gzip program. The HTTP/1.1 standard also recommends that the servers supporting this content-encoding should recognize x-gzip as an alias, for compatibility purposes.

Chunked encoding is useful when larger amounts of data are sent to the client and the total size of the response may not be known until the request has been fully processed. For example, when generating a large HTML table resulting from a database query or when transmitting large images. A chunked response looks like this:

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

7\r\n
Mozilla\r\n
9\r\n
Developer\r\n
7\r\n
Network\r\n
0\r\n
\r\n

• Accept-Encoding
• Content-Encoding
• Content-Length
• Header fields that regulate the use of trailers: TE (requests) and Trailer (responses).
• Chunked transfer encoding