Accept

The Accept request HTTP header advertises which content types, expressed as MIME types, the client is able to understand. Using content negotiation, the server then selects one of the proposals, uses it and informs the client of its choice with the Content-Type response header. Browsers set adequate values for this header depending of the context where the request is done: when fetching a CSS stylesheet a different value is set for the request than when fetching an image, video or a script.

Header type	Request header
Forbidden header name	no
CORS-safelisted request-header	yes

Syntax

Accept: <MIME_type>/<MIME_subtype>
Accept: <MIME_type>/*
Accept: */*

// Multiple types, weighted with the quality value syntax:
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml;q=0.9, */*;q=0.8

Directives

<MIME_type>/<MIME_subtype>

A single, precise MIME type, like text/html.

<MIME_type>/*

A MIME type, but without any subtype. image/* will match image/png, image/svg, image/gif and any other image types.

*/*

Any MIME type

;q= (q-factor weighting)

Any value used is placed in an order of preference expressed using relative quality value called the weight.

Examples

Accept: text/html

Accept: image/*

Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml;q=0.9, */*;q=0.8

Specifications

Specification	Title
RFC 7231, section 5.3.2: Accept	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Context

Browser compatibility

See also

• HTTP content negotiation
• Header with the result of the content negotiation: Content-Type
• Other similar headers: TE, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Charset, Accept-Language