Use of Accept-charset HTTP header

http rest http-headers rfc2616
Blessed Geek picture Blessed Geek · Nov 3, 2011 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

What are the differences and advantages of using one over the other:

Accept: application/json;charset=utf-8

versus:

Accept: application/json
Accept-Charset: utf-8

Is the first form compliant to rfc 2616?

Note: could be json or xml, etc.

Answer

npcode picture npcode · Oct 27, 2013

Both of them are compliant. But I prefer second one.

"charset" parameter is for media type and media types are defined by IANA, not by RFC 2616.

  • Even if the server understands RFC 2616, you cannot be sure it understands "charset" parameter.
  • Some media types may not have "charset" parameter.

Related questions

Customize the Authorization HTTP header

I need to authenticate a client when he sends a request to an API. The client has an API-token and I was thinking about using the standard Authorization header to send the token to the server. Normally this header is …

Read More
Paging in a Rest Collection

I'm interested in exposing a direct REST interface to collections of JSON documents (think CouchDB or Persevere). The problem I'm running into is how to handle the GET operation on the collection root if the collection is large. As an …

Read More
Is REST DELETE really idempotent?

DELETE is supposed to be idempotent. If I DELETE http://example.com/account/123 it's going to delete the account. If I do it again would I expect a 404, since the account no longer exists? What if I attempt to DELETE …

Read More