AJAX - what is the default character-encoding for HTTP header values?

2
votes

For example, suppose I'm using AJAX to send a request to a server like so:

$.ajax(
    {
        url: url,
        beforeSend: function (request) { request.setRequestHeader('X-Test', 'one'); },
    });

The documentation for $.ajax contains the following:

contentType (default: 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8') Type: String

When sending data to the server, use this content type. Default is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8", which is fine for most cases. If you explicitly pass in a content-type to $.ajax(), then it is always sent to the server (even if no data is sent). The W3C XMLHttpRequest specification dictates that the charset is always UTF-8; specifying another charset will not force the browser to change the encoding.

According to this, the default is UTF-8, but I'm not clear from the description if the contentType header affects only the encoding of the request's body or the encoding of the other headers as well (if the latter can even be changed).

2
javascriptjqueryajaxhttpcharacter-encoding
possible duplicate of HTTP header should use what character encoding? – Joe Enos

2 Answers

1
votes

contentType only affects the body/document.

According to this you can use any ISO-8859-1 characters in the header.

0
votes

You have to remember that AJAX render part of the HTML body, so when you send data in a AJAX request with some content type, for example iso-8859-1, the data is setting with that content type only in the AJAX request life cycle.

I hope my answer be useful for you.

Good lucky.