server sometimes returns chunked transfer encoding

Question

I\'m building a REST API.. Sometimes the server returns the response with chunked transfer encoding? Why is that?!

Why can\'t the server always return the response in

Answer 1

Assuming your server is using Apache, this is expected behaviour. You can disable it by putting this line in your .htaccess file:

SetEnv downgrade-1.0

However, you should consider modifying your reading code to just support different content encodings. What library are you using to make the HTTP request? Any reasonable HTTP library can handle chunked requests. If your requesting code is written in PHP, use curl. http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

Answer 2

Taken from Server Fault:

1. specify the "Content-Length' header, so server knows, what's the size of the response
2. use HTTP 1.0 at the requester's side

Answer 3

A problem may be that Apache is gzipping your download, taking care of correcting the Content-Length, or in your case, adding the header

Content-Encoding: chunked

You can add a .htaccess RewriteRule to disable gzip:

RewriteRule . - [E=no-gzip:1]