between any two adjacent words (token or quoted-string), and between adjacent words and separators, without changing the interpretation of a field. At least one delimiter (LWS and/or
separators) MUST exist between any two tokens (for the definition of "token" below), since they would otherwise be interpreted as a single token.
2.2 Basic Rules
The following rules are used throughout this specification to describe basic parsing constructs. The US-ASCII coded character set is defined by ANSI X3.4-1986 [21].
OCTET = <any 8-bit sequence of data> CHAR = <any US-ASCII character (octets 0 - 127)> UPALPHA = <any US-ASCII uppercase letter "A".."Z"> LOALPHA = <any US-ASCII lowercase letter "a".."z"> ALPHA = UPALPHA LOALPHA DIGIT = <any US-ASCII digit "0".."9"> CTL = <any US-ASCII control character (octets 0 - 31) and DEL (127)> CR = <US-ASCII CR, carriage return (13)> LF = <US-ASCII LF, linefeed (10)> SP = <US-ASCII SP, space (32)> HT = <US-ASCII HT, horizontal-tab (9)> <"> = <US-ASCII double-quote mark (34)>
HTTP/1.1 defines the sequence CR LF as the end-of-line marker for all protocol elements except the entity-body (see appendix 19.3 for tolerant applications). The end-of-line marker within an entity-body is defined by its associated media type, as described in section 3.7.
CRLF = CR LF
HTTP/1.1 header field values can be folded onto multiple lines if the continuation line begins with a space or horizontal tab. All linear white space, including folding, has the same semantics as SP. A recipient MAY replace any linear white space with a single SP before interpreting the field value or forwarding the message downstream.
LWS = [CRLF] 1*( SP HT )
The TEXT rule is only used for descriptive field contents and values that are not intended to be interpreted by the message parser. Words of *TEXT MAY contain characters from character sets other than ISO- 8859-1 [22] only when encoded according to the rules of RFC2047 [14].
TEXT = <any OCTET except CTLs, but including LWS>
A CRLF is allowed in the definition of TEXT only as part of a header field continuation. It is expected that the folding LWS will be replaced with a single SP before interpretation of the TEXT value.
Hexadecimal numeric characters are used in several protocol elements.
HEX = "A" "B" "C" "D" "E" "F" "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" DIGIT
Many HTTP/1.1 header field values consist of words separated by LWS or special characters. These special characters MUST be in a quoted string to be used within a parameter value (as defined in section 3.6).