Java HttpURLConnection: Content Length computation

Question

I'm currently developing a library for the bitbucket issues RESTful API. I made good progress and now I'm going to tackle the section Updating an Issue which demands an HTTP PUT Request.

Now I'm stuck because of the HTTP Error Code 411 Length Required. After a bit of googling, I found the following code example:

// CORRECT: get a UTF-8 encoded byte array from the response
// String and set the content-length to the length of the
// resulting byte array.
String response = [insert XML with UTF-8 characters here];
byte[] responseBytes;
try {
    responseBytes = response.getBytes("UTF-8");
}
catch ( UnsupportedEncodingException e ) {
    System.err.print("My computer hates UTF-8");
}

this.contentLength_ = responseBytes.length;

Now my question: What is exactly measured?

• the query string
• the urlencoded query string
• only the values of the parameters...??

And is connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Length", String.valueOf(<mycomputedInt>)); an appriopate way of setting the content length attribute?

Examples appreciated. Thanks in advance.

---

edit:

For instance, you could explain computation with the following curl example from the bitbucket wiki entry:

curl -X PUT -d "content=Updated%20Content" \
https://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/repositories/sarahmaddox/sarahmaddox/issues/1/

Answer 1

Your are doing the request, right. The content-length is the number of bytes of your request body. In your case

int content-length = "content=Updated%20Content".getBytes("UTF-8").length;

What is exactly measured?

the url encoded query string (when in the request/entity body)