Request and Response Headers 
============================

HTTP messages are composed of a header and message body containing the data.

Header lines provide information about the request or response, or about the object sent in the message body. A header line is ASCII text in the form "header-name:value". The "header-name" is not case-sensitive although the "value" may be. A header may have as many header lines as needed.

Section 14 of `RFC 2616 Fielding, et al., Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.1 <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14>`_ defines header lines.

For requests, the Torrent Suite™ Software API usually only requires headers to be specified for PUT, POST, and DELETE methods. For GET requests, the necessary information is provided as a parameter. Response messages from the server always include a header.

Topics on this page:

* :ref:`apimanref_reqhdr`

* :ref:`apimanref_resphdr`


.. _apimanref_reqhdr:

Request header
--------------

A request header might be as simple as the following example::

	Content-Type:application/json

This specifies the format of the transmitted data, if it is not specified as a parameter.

.. _apimanref_resphdr:

Response header
---------------

A response header is usually similar to the following example::

	Status Code:200 OK
	Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:38:49 GMT
	Server: Apache/2.2.2.14 (Ubuntu)
	Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
	Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
	Connection: Keep-Alive
	Transfer-Encoding: chunked

The ``Status Code`` is of particular interest, and the ``Content-Type`` header line describes the data format.