What is the boundary in multipart/form-data?

Question

I want to ask a question about the multipart/form-data. In the HTTP header, I find that the Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=???.

Is the ??? free to be defined by the user? Or it is generally from the HTML? Is it possible for me to define the ??? = abcdefg?

Answer 1

multipart/form-data contains boundary to separate name/value pairs. The boundary acts like a marker of each chunk of name/value pairs passed when a form gets submitted. The boundary is automatically added to a content-type of a request header.

The form with enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute will have a request header Content-Type : multipart/form-data; boundary --- WebKit193844043-h (browser generated vaue).

The payload passed looks something like this:

Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=—-WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW

    --—-WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW
    Content-Disposition: form-data; name=”file”; filename=”captcha”
    Content-Type:

    --—-WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW
    Content-Disposition: form-data; name=”action”

    submit
    --—-WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW--

On the webservice side, it's consumed in @Consumes("multipart/form-data") form.

Beware, when testing your webservice using chrome postman, you need to check the form data option(radio button) and File menu from the dropdown box to send attachment. Explicit provision of content-type as multipart/form-data throws an error. Because boundary is missing as it overrides the curl request of post man to server with content-type by appending the boundary which works fine.

See RFC1341 sec7.2 The Multipart Content-Type

Answer 2

Is the ??? free to be defined by the user?

Yes.

or is it supplied by the HTML?

No. HTML has nothing to do with that. Read below.

Is it possible for me to define the ??? as abcdefg?

Yes.

If you want to send the following data to the web server:

name = John
age = 12

using application/x-www-form-urlencoded would be like this:

name=John&age=12

As you can see, the server knows that parameters are separated by an ampersand &. If & is required for a parameter value then it must be encoded.

So how does the server know where a parameter value starts and ends when it receives an HTTP request using multipart/form-data?

Using the boundary, similar to &.

For example:

--XXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

John
--XXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="age"

12
--XXX--

In that case, the boundary value is XXX. You specify it in the Content-Type header so that the server knows how to split the data it receives.

So you need to:

• Use a value that won't appear in the HTTP data sent to the server.

• Be consistent and use the same value everywhere in the request message.

Answer 3

The exact answer to the question is: yes, you can use an arbitrary value for the boundary parameter, given it does not exceed 70 bytes in length and consists only of 7-bit US-ASCII (printable) characters.

If you are using one of multipart/* content types, you are actually required to specify the boundary parameter in the Content-Type header, otherwise the server (in the case of an HTTP request) will not be able to parse the payload.

You probably also want to set the charset parameter to UTF-8 in your Content-Type header, unless you can be absolutely sure that only US-ASCII charset will be used in the payload data.

A few relevant excerpts from the RFC2046:

• 4.1.2. Charset Parameter:

  Unlike some other parameter values, the values of the charset parameter are NOT case sensitive. The default character set, which must be assumed in the absence of a charset parameter, is US-ASCII.

• 5.1. Multipart Media Type

  As stated in the definition of the Content-Transfer-Encoding field [RFC 2045], no encoding other than "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" is permitted for entities of type "multipart". The "multipart" boundary delimiters and header fields are always represented as 7bit US-ASCII in any case (though the header fields may encode non-US-ASCII header text as per RFC 2047) and data within the body parts can be encoded on a part-by-part basis, with Content-Transfer-Encoding fields for each appropriate body part.

  The Content-Type field for multipart entities requires one parameter, "boundary". The boundary delimiter line is then defined as a line consisting entirely of two hyphen characters ("-", decimal value 45) followed by the boundary parameter value from the Content-Type header field, optional linear whitespace, and a terminating CRLF.

  Boundary delimiters must not appear within the encapsulated material, and must be no longer than 70 characters, not counting the two leading hyphens.

  The boundary delimiter line following the last body part is a distinguished delimiter that indicates that no further body parts will follow. Such a delimiter line is identical to the previous delimiter lines, with the addition of two more hyphens after the boundary parameter value.

Here is an example using an arbitrary boundary:

Content-Type: multipart/form-data; charset=utf-8; boundary="another cool boundary"

--another cool boundary
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="foo"

bar
--another cool boundary
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="baz"

quux
--another cool boundary--