Default content-type

[Aniket Patil]

Is the default content-type "text/html" for servlet response?

[Muhammad Saifuddin]

Answer is Yes.

[Sanjeev Singh]

Yes it is text/html unless specified explicitly using setContentType(String str) method before writing the message to response object.

[Bosun Bello]

I thought it was text/plain for servlets.

[Muhammad Saifuddin]

setContentType() JavaDoc

[Ben Souther]

There isn't a default.
If you don't set a content type, no content type header will be sent.

The LiveHTTPHeaders pluging for Firefox is a great tool to use if you want to see this for yourself.

I just commented out the line with setContentType in a simple Hello, World servlet and ran it.
Here are the response headers:

<a href="http://localhost:8080/SimpleServlet/simple-servlet" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:8080/SimpleServlet/simple-servlet</a>
 
GET /SimpleServlet/simple-servlet HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: <a href="http://localhost:8080/SimpleServlet/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:8080/SimpleServlet/</a>
 
[B]
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Length: 117
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:54:14 GMT
[/B]
 
    

[Aniket Patil]

Ben,

Exactly my thoughts, i remember reading that there isn't a default, needed confirmation.

Would be intersted to know how the browser assumes it to be "text/html" when no content-type is set? Is this the default for a browser?
[ January 14, 2007: Message edited by: Aniket Patil ]

[Paul Clapham]

Originally posted by Aniket Patil:
Would be intersted to know how the browser assumes it to be "text/html" when no content-type is set? Is this the default for a browser?

If you want to know why a browser will assume text/html if no content type is set, that's naturally because browsers are mostly used to display HTML pages, so it's a pretty good bet. If you want to know how, well it's an if-statement that you could probably imagine quite easily.