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Is there any way to know if the message body of an HTTP response is encoded with Base64?
I learnt that content-transfer-encoding is not part of HTTP header.
So, which HTTP header indicates that the content is encoded with Base64? I think Content-encoding is only used for compressions.
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In basic HTTP authentication, a request contains a header field in the form of Authorization: Basic <credentials> , where credentials is the Base64 encoding of ID and password joined by a single colon : . It was originally implemented by Ari Luotonen at CERN in 1993 and defined in the HTTP 1.0 specification in 1996.
Content encoding is mainly used to compress the message data without losing information about the origin media type. Note that the original media/content type is specified in the Content-Type header, and that the Content-Encoding applies to the representation, or "coded form", of the data.
Base64 is a group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation. The term Base64 originates from a specific MIME content transfer encoding.
As far as I understand, an HTTP body may not be encoded in Base64:
HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding (CTE) field of RFC 2045. Proxies and gateways from MIME-compliant protocols to HTTP MUST remove any non-identity CTE ("quoted-printable" or "base64") encoding prior to delivering the response message to an HTTP client.
Identity being:
The default (identity) encoding; the use of no transformation whatsoever.
Of course you're allowed to transport Base64-encoded data using HTTP, but that should be something both parties (client and server) agree on, and there doesn't seem to be a header to describe this behavior.
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