The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws

General Headers

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Connection — 

This is used to inform the other end of the communica-

tion whether it should close the TCP connection after the HTTP trans-

mission has completed or keep it open for further messages.

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Content-Encoding

— This is used to specify what kind of encoding is

being used for the content contained in the message body, such as 

gzip

,

which is used by some applications to compress responses for faster

transmission.

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Content-Length

— This is used to specify the length of the message

body, in bytes (except in the case of responses to 

HEAD

requests, when it

indicates the length of the body in the response to the corresponding

GET

request).

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Content-Type

— This is used to specify the type of content contained in

the message body; for example, 

text/html

for HTML documents.

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