Which encoding is used by the HTTP protocol?

Question

When a browser sends an HTTP request to a web server, what encoding is used to encode the HTTP protocol on the wire? Is it ASCII? UTF8? or UTF16? Or does it specify which en

Answer 1

RFC 2616 includes this:

OCTET          = 
CHAR           = 
UPALPHA        = 
LOALPHA        = 
ALPHA          = UPALPHA | LOALPHA
DIGIT          = 
CTL            = 
CR             = 
LF             = 
SP             = 
HT             = 
<">            = 

And then pretty much everything else in the document is defined in terms of those entities (OCTET, CHAR, etc.). So you could look through the RFC to find out which parts of an HTTP request/response can include OCTETs; all other parts must be ASCII. (I'd do it myself, but it'd take a long time)

For the request line specifically, the method name and HTTP version are going to be ASCII characters only, but it's possible that the URL itself could include non-ASCII characters. But if you look at RFC 2396, it says that.

A URI is a sequence of characters from a very limited set, i.e. the letters of the basic Latin alphabet, digits, and a few special characters.

Which I guess means that it'll consist of ASCII characters as well.