Content-Length header with HEAD requests?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

Section 14.13 of the HTTP/1.1 spec detailed the Content-Length header, and says this:

Applications SHOULD use this field to indicate the transfer-length of the message-body, unless this is prohibited by the rules in section 4.4.

The word 'SHOULD' has a very specific meaning in RFCs:

3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

So, you may not always see a Content-Length. Typically you might not see it for any content which is dynamically generated, since that might be too expensive to service an exploratory HEAD request. For example, a HEAD request to Apache for a static file will have a Content-Length, but a request for a PHP script may not.

For example, try this very website...

telnet stackoverflow.com 80

HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Host:stackoverflow.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:58:25 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: close
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=c2eb4742a1e02d89cab0402220736c0bd1452509905; expires=Tue, 10-Jan-17 10:58:25 GMT; path=/; domain=.stackoverflow.com; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: public, no-cache="Set-Cookie", max-age=36
Expires: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:59:02 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 10:58:02 GMT
Vary: *
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Request-Guid: 487e80bc-3783-4cfd-d883-a3bc84253234
Set-Cookie: prov=8dc24306-c067-45eb-bf5d-cffa855c2b03; domain=.stackoverflow.com; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2055 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly
Server: cloudflare-nginx
CF-RAY: 26303c15f8e035a2-LHR

No content-length there.

Solution 3:

Yes, the Content-Length of a HEAD response SHOULD, but not always does (see @Paul's answer) include the Content-Length value of a GET response:

Stack Overflow does:

> telnet stackoverflow.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: stackoverflow.com


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public, max-age=60
Content-Length: 362245                           <--------
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:51:49 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:50:49 GMT
Vary: *
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:50:49 GMT

Google doesn't:

> telnet www.google.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.ie


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:55:36 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Solution 4:

The HTTP-spec at W3C states:

If the new field values indicate that the cached entity differs from the current entity (as would be indicated by a change in Content-Length, ...

Which (to me) means it should hold the "correct" value as you would in a GET response.