what is the use of response setContentType text html in servlet

Question

public class HelloWorld extends HttpServlet         public void doGet HttpServletRequest request         HttpServletResponse response        throws ServletException IOException          response setContentType  text html            PrintWriter pw   response getWriter          pw println   lt html gt           pw println   lt head gt  lt title gt Hello World lt  title gt  lt  title gt           pw println   lt body gt           pw println   lt h1 gt Hello World lt  h1 gt           pw println   lt  body gt  lt  html gt

User · Accepted Answer

Content types are included in HTTP responses because the same, byte for byte sequence of values in the content could be interpreted in more than one way.(*)

Remember that http can transport more than just HTML (js, css and images are obvious examples), and in some cases, the receiver will not know what type of object it's going to receive.

(*) the obvious one here is XHTML - which is XML. If it's served with a content type of application/xml, the receiver ought to just treat it as XML. If it's served up as application/xhtml+xml, then it ought to be treated as XHTML.

User · Answer

It is one of the MIME type  in this case you are reponse header MIME type to text html it means it displays html type  It is a information to browser  There are other types you can set to display excel  zip etc  Please see MIME Type for more information

User · Answer

response setContentType  text html      Above code would be include in  HTTP response  to inform the browser about the format of the response  so that the browser can interpret it

User · Answer

It means what type of response you want to send to client  some content types like     res setContentType  image gif     res setContentType  application pdf     res setContentType  application zip

User · Answer

From JavaEE docs ServletResponse setContentType     Sets the content type of the response being sent to the client  if the response has not been committed yet  The given content type may include a character encoding specification  for example         response setContentType  text html charset UTF-8       The response s character encoding is only set from the given content type if this method is called before getWriter is called  This method may be called repeatedly to change content type and character encoding   This method has no effect if called after the response has been committed  It does not set the response s character encoding if it is called after getWriter has been called or after the response has been committed  Containers must communicate the content type and the character encoding used for the servlet response s writer to the client if the protocol provides a way for doing so  In the case of HTTP  the Content-Type header is used

User · Answer

You have to tell the browser what you are sending back so that the browser can take appropriate action like launching a PDF viewer if its a PDF that is being received or launching a video player to play video file  rendering the HTML if the content type is simple html response  save the bytes of the response as a downloaded file  etc   some common MIME types are text html application pdf video quicktime application java image jpeg application jar etc  In your case since you are sending HTML response to client you will have to set the content type as text html

[java] what is the use of "response.setContentType("text/html")" in servlet

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