What is http multipart request

Question

I have been writing iPhone applications for some time now  sending data to server  receiving data  via HTTP protocol   without thinking too much about it  Mostly I am theoretically familiar with process  but the part I am not so familiar is HTTP multipart request  I know its basic structure  but the core of it eludes me   It seems that whenever I am sending something different than plain text  like photos  music   I have to use a multipart request  Can someone briefly explain to me why it is used and what are its advantages   If I use it  why is it better way to send photos that way

User · Answer

I have found an excellent and relatively short explanation here   A multipart request is a REST request containing several packed REST requests inside its entity

User · Answer

A HTTP multipart request is a HTTP request that HTTP clients construct to send files and data over to a HTTP Server  It is commonly used by browsers and HTTP clients to upload files to the server     What it looks like  See Multipart Content-Type  See multipart form-data

User · Answer

As the official specification says   quot one or more different sets of data are combined in a single body quot   So when photos and music are handled as multipart messages as mentioned in the question  probably there is some plain text metadata associated as well  thus making the request containing different types of data  binary  text   which implies the usage of multipart

[http-headers] What is http multipart request?

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