I'm playing around with the HTTP range header (specs).

From what I understand I can set byte ranges of files ala

0-199/2000
200-499/2000
500-799/2000
etc

Question:
Say I only want to access certain ranges of a file, would it be possible to specify these ranges and then work with the "incomplete" data I received? I'm playing around with filtering a large log file, so I'm curious if something like this would work.

Thanks for inputs!

I'm playing around with the HTTP range header (specs).

From what I understand I can set byte ranges of files ala

0-199/2000
200-499/2000
500-799/2000
etc

Question:
Say I only want to access certain ranges of a file, would it be possible to specify these ranges and then work with the "incomplete" data I received? I'm playing around with filtering a large log file, so I'm curious if something like this would work.

Thanks for inputs!

• javascript
• http
• http-headers
• range
• filtering

• 1 Seems to me like the perfect case to use that header. w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.35.2 – Supericy Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 11:22
• Yeah, I also think it was developed exactly for such cases. Haven't you tried if that works? – VisioN Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 11:28
• As has already been mentioned, that's exactly what range requests are for. This is generally how media "streaming" is accomplished via HTTP. – user895378 Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 13:46
• yes. I'm thinking more into using this as a filter of a large file, similar to what is described here. Would be nice if it was possible to not only filter "from-to" like this. – frequent Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 13:48

1 Answer 1

You are right, the link which you posted in the comment would be probably the best approach. As your question sounded interesting i tried it out. You probably did it also, but here is an snippet (for other, that may come looking)

var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.open("GET","data.dat",false);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Range", "bytes=100-200");
xmlhttp.send();
console.info(xmlhttp); //--> returns only the partial content
// Tested on Win7 with chrome 46+

Watch-out: the web-server has to support this Request Header Range, for it to work.