Re: WSGI Content-Length issues.

Graham Dumpleton wrote:
> Can the group mind provide some clarification on the following please.
> 
> 1. The WSGI specification does not require that a WSGI 
> adapter provide an EOF indicator if an attempt is made to 
> read more data from wsgi.input than defined by request 
> Content-Length.

This is not a problem when the Content-Length header is provided in the
request, because the application should never read more than
<Content-Length> bytes.

RFC 2616 says "The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled
by the inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field
in the request's message-headers." If those headers are missing, then
the application has to assume there is no message body, and the WSGI
gateway is free to dispose of any message body it can detect.

I do agree that the handling of chunked request bodies is not ideal; the
current wording implies that the gateway must buffer the entire chunked
request body until it can calculate the Content-Length, before calling
the application object. This pretty much defeats the purpose of chunked
encoding. On the other hand, it is a pretty minor issue because chunked
request bodies are very rare.

> Is though a WSGI adapter required to 
> explicitly discard any request content which wasn't consumed 
> or is the WSGI applications responsibility to ensure that all 
> request content up to the length specified is always consumed?