Theoretically, a HTTP/1.0 server should accept an unknown content-length if the connection is closed after the request.
Unfortunately, the response 411 Length Required, is only defined in HTTP/1.1.
//Stefan
Am Dienstag, 07.10.03, um 01:12 Uhr (Europe/Berlin) schrieb Hrvoje Niksic:
As I was writing the manual for `--post', I decided that I wasn't happy with this part:
Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in advance. Therefore the argument to @code{--post-file} must be a regular file; specifying a FIFO or something like @file{/dev/stdin} won't work.
My first impulse was to bemoan Wget's antiquated HTTP code which doesn't understand "chunked" transfer. But, coming to think of it, even if Wget used HTTP/1.1, I don't see how a client can send chunked requests and interoperate with HTTP/1.0 servers.
The thing is, to be certain that you can use chunked transfer, you have to know you're dealing with an HTTP/1.1 server. But you can't know that until you receive a response. And you don't get a response until you've finished sending the request. A chicken-and-egg problem!
Of course, once a response is received, we could remember that we're dealing with an HTTP/1.1 server, but that information is all but useless, since Wget's `--post' is typically used to POST information to one URL and exit.
Is there a sane way to stream data to HTTP/1.0 servers that expect POST?
