I'm trying to upload file, using XMLHTTPRequest, and sending this headers:

Content-Type:multipart/form-data, boundary=xxxxxxxxx

--xxxxxxxxx
Content-Disposition: form-data; name='uploadfile'; filename='123_logo.jpg'
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: image/jpeg
/*base64data*/

But on server side PHP ignore header "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" and write base64 undecoded data directly into the file!

Is there any way to fix it?

p.s. it is very important to send data using base64

I'm trying to upload file, using XMLHTTPRequest, and sending this headers:

Content-Type:multipart/form-data, boundary=xxxxxxxxx

--xxxxxxxxx
Content-Disposition: form-data; name='uploadfile'; filename='123_logo.jpg'
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: image/jpeg
/*base64data*/

But on server side PHP ignore header "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" and write base64 undecoded data directly into the file!

Is there any way to fix it?

p.s. it is very important to send data using base64

• php
• javascript
• http-headers
• xmlhttprequest

• Why do you construct the headers manually? Why is it significant to send it base64-encoded rather than binary? – mario Commented Mar 2, 2011 at 15:18
• Because there is no implemented method xhr.sendAsBinary() in Google Chrome. – Scalar Commented Mar 2, 2011 at 15:26

2 Answers 2

Xavier's answer doesn't sound right. RFC2616 also has this to say (section 3.7):

In general, HTTP treats a multipart message-body no differently than
any other media type: strictly as payload. The one exception is the
"multipart/byteranges"

It seems to me that section 19.4 of RFC2616 is talking about HTTP as a whole, in the sense that it uses a syntax similar to MIME (like headers format), but is not MIME-compliant.

Also, there is RFC2388. In section 3, last paragraph, it says:

Each part may be encoded and the "content-transfer-encoding" header
supplied if the value of that part does not conform to the default
encoding.

Section 4.3 elaborates on this:

4.3 Encoding

While the HTTP protocol can transport arbitrary binary data, the default for mail transport is the 7BIT encoding. The value supplied for a part may need to be encoded and the "content-transfer-encoding" header supplied if the value does not conform to the default encoding. [See section 5 of RFC 2046 for more details.]

My previous answer was wrong

Content-Transfer-Encoding may appear in the a composite body

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

There are several consequences of this. The entity-body for composite types MAY contain many body-parts, each with its own MIME and HTTP headers (including Content-MD5, Content-Transfer-Encoding, and Content-Encoding headers).