HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
We've broken the value into two lines here for clarity, but in reality,
the browser sends the data in an unbroken string. The
name
field is
O'Reilly Media
, and the value of the
address
field, complete with embed-
ded newline characters, is:
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol,
CA 95472
9.2.2.2. The multipart/form-data encoding
The multipart/form-data encoding encapsulates the fields in the form as
several parts of a single Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME)-
compatible compound document. Each field has its own section in the
resulting file, set off by a standard delimiter. Within each section, one or
more header lines define the name of the field, followed by one or more
lines containing the value of the field. Because the value part of each
section can contain binary data or otherwise unprintable characters, no
character conversion or encoding occurs within the transmitted data.
This encoding format is by nature more verbose and longer than the ap-
plication/x-www-form-urlencoded format. As such, you can use it only
when the
method
attribute of the
<form>
tag is set to
post
, as described in
section 9.2.4
, later in this chapter. A simple example makes it easy to
understand this format. Here's our previous example, when transmitted
as multipart/form-data:
------------------------------146931364513459
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"
O'Reilly Media
------------------------------146931364513459
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="address"
