206 Partial Content

The HTTP 206 Partial Content successful response status code is sent in response to a range request. The response body contains the requested ranges of data as specified in the Range header of the request.

The format of the response depends on the number of ranges requested. If a single range is requested, the Content-Type of the entire response is set to the type of the document, and a Content-Range is provided. If several ranges are requested, the Content-Type is set to multipart/byteranges, and each fragment covers one range, with its own Content-Range and Content-Type headers describing it.

Status

http
206 Partial Content

Examples

Receiving a 206 response for a single requested range

The following is a sample 206 response when a single range of 21010- (bytes 21010 to the end of file) of an image file is requested. The response contains Content-Type of image/gif and the Content-Range is provided:

http
GET /z4d4kWk.gif HTTP/1.1
Host: images.example.com
Range: bytes=21010-
http
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2015 06:25:24 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Nov 2015 04:58:08 GMT
Content-Range: bytes 21010-47021/47022
Content-Length: 26012
Content-Type: image/gif
ETag: "abc123"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

# 26012 bytes of partial image data…

Receiving a 206 response for multiple requested ranges

Following is a sample 206 response when two ranges of a PDF file are requested. The response contains the multipart/byteranges Content-Type with a separate Content-Type (application/pdf) and Content-Range for each range.

http
GET /price-list.pdf HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Range: bytes=234-639,4590-7999
http
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2015 06:25:24 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Nov 2015 04:58:08 GMT
Content-Length: 1741
Content-Type: multipart/byteranges; boundary=String_separator
ETag: "abc123"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

--String_separator
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Range: bytes 234-639/8000

# content of first range (406 bytes)
--String_separator
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Range: bytes 4590-7999/8000

# content of second range (3410 bytes)
--String_separator--

Specifications

Specification
HTTP Semantics
# status.206

See also