Revision 1129187 of Content-Type

<div>{{HTTPSidebar}}</div>

<p>The <strong><code>Content-Type</code></strong> entity header is used to indicate the {{Glossary("MIME type","media type")}} of the resource.</p>

<p>In responses, a <code>Content-Type</code> header tells the client what the content type of the returned content actually is. Browsers will do MIME sniffing in some cases and will not necessarily follow the value of this header; to prevent this behavior, the header {{HTTPHeader("X-Content-Type-Options")}} can be set to <code>nosniff</code>.</p>

<p>In requests, (such as {{HTTPMethod("POST")}} or {{HTTPMethod("PUT")}}), the client tells the server what type of data is actually sent.</p>

<table class="properties">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th scope="row">Header type</th>
   <td>{{Glossary("Entity header")}}</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Forbidden header name")}}</th>
   <td>no</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Simple response header", "CORS-safelisted response-header")}}</th>
   <td>yes</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

<h2 id="Syntax">Syntax</h2>

<pre class="syntaxbox">
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=something
</pre>

<h2 id="Directives">Directives</h2>

<dl>
 <dt><code>media-type</code></dt>
 <dd>The <a href="/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/MIME_types">MIME type</a> of the resource or the data.</dd>
 <dt>charset</dt>
 <dd>The character encoding standard.</dd>
 <dt>boundary</dt>
 <dd>For multipart entities the <code>boundary</code> directive is required, which consists of 1 to 70 characters from a set of characters known to be very robust through email gateways, and not ending with white space. It is used to encapsulate the boundaries of the multiple parts of the message.</dd>
</dl>

<h2 id="Examples">Examples</h2>

<h3 id="Content-Type_in_HTML_forms"><code>Content-Type</code> in HTML forms</h3>

<p>In a {{HTTPMethod("POST")}} request, resulting from an HTML form submission, the <code>Content-Type</code> of the request is specified by the <code>enctype</code> attribute on the {{HTMLElement("form")}} element.</p>

<pre class="brush: html">
&lt;form action="/" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"&gt;
  &lt;input type="text" name="description" value="some text"&gt;
  &lt;input type="file" name="myFile"&gt;
  &lt;button type="submit"&gt;Submit&lt;/button&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;
</pre>

<p>The request looks something like this (less interesting headers are omitted here):</p>

<pre>
POST /foo HTTP/1.1
Content-Length: 68137
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------974767299852498929531610575
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="description"
---------------------------974767299852498929531610575

some text

---------------------------974767299852498929531610575
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="myFile"; filename="foo.txt" 
Content-Type: text/plain 

(content of the uploaded file foo.txt)

---------------------------974767299852498929531610575
</pre>

<h2 id="Specifications">Specifications</h2>

<table class="standard-table">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th scope="col">Specification</th>
   <th scope="col">Title</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>{{RFC("7233", "Content-Type in multipart", "4.1")}}</td>
   <td>Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Range Requests</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>{{RFC("7231", "Content-Type", "3.1.1.5")}}</td>
   <td>Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

<h2 id="Browser_compatibility">Browser compatibility</h2>

<p class="hidden">The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out <a href="https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data">https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data</a> and send us a pull request.</p>

<p>{{Compat}}</p>

<h2 id="See_also">See also</h2>

<ul>
 <li>{{HTTPHeader("Accept")}} and {{HTTPHeader("Accept-Charset")}}</li>
 <li>{{HTTPHeader("Content-Disposition")}}</li>
 <li>{{HTTPStatus("206")}} Partial Content</li>
 <li>{{HTTPHeader("X-Content-Type-Options")}}</li>
</ul>