I have a question regarding the HTTP format. The first line of a HTTP request looks something like this:
GET /path/to/resource.txt HTTP/1.1
or in other words:
METHOD URI HTTP-VERSION
Is it required that the URI
starts with the /
character so that /path/to/resource.txt
would be the same as path/to/resource.txt
and both are valid?
And if a leading /
is not required, are GET / HTTP/1.1
and GET HTTP/1.1
the same too? (two spaces between GET
and HTTP/1.1
)
See RFC 7230, section 5.3 Request target:
Once an inbound connection is obtained, the client sends an HTTP request message (Section 3) with a request-target derived from the target URI. There are four distinct formats for the request-target, depending on both the method being requested and whether the request is to a proxy.
request-target = origin-form
/ absolute-form
/ authority-form
/ asterisk-form
You're talking about origin-form, described in subsection 5.3.1:
When making a request directly to an origin server, other than a CONNECT or server-wide OPTIONS request (as detailed below), a client MUST send only the absolute path and query components of the target URI as the request-target. If the target URI's path component is empty, the client MUST send "/" as the path within the origin-form of request-target. A Host header field is also sent, as defined in Section 5.4.
For example, a client wishing to retrieve a representation of the resource identified as
http://www.example.org/where?q=now
directly from the origin server would open (or reuse) a TCP connection to port 80 of the host "www.example.org" and send the lines:
GET /where?q=now HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
And an "absolute path" is defined earlier in section 2.7 as
absolute-path = 1*( "/" segment )
So yes, some target identifier is required, the path is always prefixed with a slash, and if unknown, empty or inapplicable, it is /
.
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