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About

text/html

text/html tells the browser to parse and render the response as a web page and run its scripts. It is the type to send for your pages, and the one never to send for content you did not write.

Open in cURL Builder A request with this type is filled in.

Header

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

At a glance

Extensions
.html, .htm
Kind
Text
Parameters
charset. Back it up with <meta charset="utf-8"> in the first 1024 bytes of the document.
In a browser
Parses and renders the page, and runs its scripts.

With curl

curl -i -H 'Accept: text/html' https://example.com/

With fetch

const res = await fetch('https://example.com/', { headers: { Accept: 'text/html' } });
const html = await res.text();

Common mistakes

  • No charset, wrong letters

    Without a charset in the header or a meta tag in the first 1024 bytes, the browser guesses the encoding, and a wrong guess turns every accented letter into two odd ones.

  • User uploads served as HTML

    A file served as text/html from your domain runs its scripts with your cookies. Serve uploads as application/octet-stream or with Content-Disposition: attachment, ideally from another domain.

  • HTML error pages on JSON APIs

    An error page from a proxy (a 502 Bad Gateway from nginx) arrives as HTML, and response.json() throws on the first <. Check response.ok and the Content-Type before parsing.