About
accept-encoding 1) is a request header that lists the encoding format that the client can read.
Example
With a get request
GET https://datacadamia.com/web/http/method HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Example of values
Accept-Encoding:
Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip
Accept-Encoding: *
Accept-Encoding: compress;q=0.5, gzip;q=1.0
Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, identity; q=0.5, *;q=0
where the value tells the content coding 2) what the client will accept
| Content coding Value | Description |
|---|---|
| empty value | the client accept any content coding (by default, the server should return the identity content coding) |
| compress | The format produced by the UNIX compression program “compress” (adaptive Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding (LZW)) |
| gzip | The format produced by the file compression program gzip (GNU zip) |
| * | matches any available content-coding |
What if the encoding is not available ?
If the server cannot send a acceptable response, it would send an error response with the 406 (Not Acceptable) status code.