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The http spec says about the HEAD request:
The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response. The metainformation contained in the HTTP headers in response to a HEAD request SHOULD be identical to the information sent in response to a GET request.
Should the response to a HEAD request contain a Content-Length header? Should it be the value which would be returned on a GET request, even if there is no response body? Or should the Content-Length be 0?
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To manually pass the Content-Length header, you need to add the Content-Length: [length] and Content-Type: [mime type] headers to your request, which describe the size and type of data in the body of the POST request.
The Content-Length header indicates the size of the message body, in bytes, sent to the recipient.
The Content-Length header is mandatory for messages with entity bodies, unless the message is transported using chunked encoding. Content-Length is needed to detect premature message truncation when servers crash and to properly segment messages that share a persistent connection.
The content-length is the size of the compressed message body, in "octets" (i.e. in units of 8 bits, which happen to be "bytes" for all modern computers). The size of the actual message body can be something else, perhaps 150280 bytes.
To me it looks like the HTTP 1.1 RFC is pretty specific:
The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the entity-body, in decimal number of OCTETs, sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
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