bizarre web server response

[Yef]

Hi,

Recently, my program retrieved a page from a web server.
In its response it said:

Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/4.3.10
mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7d
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10

But within the HTML response I found numerous lines that had only
3 characters each, always 0..9 and a..f i.e. hexadecimal.

These were always inside of links. For example

text text <a href="http://lin
5ef
k.com">text text</a>

When I look at this in a web browser, the browser ignores
the 5ef and constructs a valid link.

Can someone tell me what these little 3-character things
are all about? Is there a standard that specifies what
these are used for?

Thanks.

[Klaus Johannes Rusch]

Post by Yef
Recently, my program retrieved a page from a web server.
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/4.3.10
mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7d
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10

What other headers did the server send, in particular did the server
specify a transfer coding?

Post by Yef
But within the HTML response I found numerous lines that had only
3 characters each, always 0..9 and a..f i.e. hexadecimal.
These were always inside of links. For example
text text <a href="http://lin
5ef
k.com">text text</a>
When I look at this in a web browser, the browser ignores
the 5ef and constructs a valid link.

From the short sample this looks like chunked encoding,
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.6.1