HTTP headers
HTTP header fields are components of the header section of request and response messages in the (HTTP). They define the operating parameters of an HTTP transaction.
The header fields are transmitted after the request or response line, which is the first line of a message. Header fields are colon-separated name-value pairs in clear-text string format, terminated by a carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) character sequence. The end of the header section is indicated by an empty field, resulting in the transmission of two consecutive CR-LF pairs. Historically, long lines could be folded into multiple lines; continuation lines are indicated by the presence of a space (SP) or horizontal tab (HT) as the first character on the next line. This folding is now deprecated.
A core set of fields is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFCs 7230, 7231, 7232, 7233, 7234, and 7235. The permanent registry of header fields and repository of provisional registrations are maintained by the IANA. Additional field names and permissible values may be defined by each application.
Non-standard header fields were conventionally marked by prefixing the field name with X- but this convention was deprecated in June 2012 because of the inconveniences it caused when non-standard fields became standard. An earlier restriction on use of Downgraded- was lifted in March 2013.
A few fields can contain comments (i.e. in User-Agent, Server, Via fields), which can be ignored by software.
Many field values may contain a quality (q) key-value pair, specifying a weight to use in content negotiation.
The standard imposes no limits to the size of each header field name or value, or to the number of fields. However, most servers, clients, and proxy software impose some limits for practical and security reasons. For example, the Apache 2.3 server by default limits the size of each field to 8190 bytes, and there can be at most 100 header fields in a single request.
Mandatory since HTTP/1.1.
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