Question

I’m using an NSMutableURLRequest to perform a simple file upload from iOS5 to a custom server. When I send the request, I have it print out the length of bodyContents, which contains the body of the request. For the particular request I am working on, it will say that the length is 46784. I don’t set the content-length, since I found out it was doing that automatically, but I pull the info anyway in case I need it later. The headers being received by the server say that the content-length is 46784. When I do a character count on the body at the server end, it tells me that the length of the body is 46788, 4 too many. I ran another request, again, the request had 4 more characters than what I sent.

At first, I thought it had to be on the server side, just because it didn’t make any sense. So I sent a request from a test program that I know works to the server, and checked the length of the body it sent against the content-length header and they were identical.

What is the best way to deal with this? Should I manually set the content-length to 4+[bodyContents length]? I don’t think that would be what I would want to do, just because I shouldn’t have to add extra space for data I don’t know that I want.

Here is the code that sends the request

-(void)send:(id)delegate
{
    bodyContents = [bodyContents stringByAppendingFormat:@"--%@--",boundry];
    NSInteger length = [bodyContents length];
    NSLog(@"Length is %i",length);
    [request setHTTPBody:[bodyContents dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
    NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc]initWithRequest:request delegate:delegate];
    if(connection)
    {
        NSLog(@"Connection good");
    }
    else
    {
        NSLog(@"Connection bad");
    }
}

I set the content-type property of the request in the init method of the class.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

When you specify an encoding, the size of the contents can change… get the size after you set the HTTPBody and then see if that adjusts things up by four bytes automatically.