Question

I have a problem with long urls in the context of video streaming via the amazon cloudfront cdn and signedd urls on a media-box.

RFC 2068 – Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1 states:

 Note: Servers should be cautious about depending on URI lengths
 above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy implementations
 may not properly support these lengths.

This seems to be exactly the limitation i am running into. Because 255 character long urls work, 256 characters don’t.

However I am a little confused because I thought in ASCII a character is encoded by 7 bit.

I also know that the valid characters in an URL are entirely covered by the ascii alphabet.

I do know that it is common practice to extend to an 8-bit alphabet to support more characters or use the one bit missing to one byte for error detection/correction.

My question now is:

In the context of http requests. What exactly is meant when speaking of a length of 255 bytes. How many characters and how is this number reproduceable?

Answer 1

Ascii only uses the first 7 bits of each byte, but every character still takes up one byte.