HTTP response contains text I don't understand - php

Question

I have a PHP script that receives a file and returns a response.
The PHP script returns the response like this:
echo "<response><status>success</status><message>file received: test.txt</message></response>";
When I make the POST request from PuTTY, the response I receive is this:
6b
<response><status>success</status><message>file received: test.txt</message></response>
Depending on the response, the 6b could be something else as well? Is this the length of the response in hex, or something else?
The PHP script. Currently, I'm working on simply being able to POST a file and receive and parse the response, hence the PHP file is barebones.
<?php
if (array_key_exists('file',$_FILES) && $_FILES['file']['size'] != 0)
{
$status = 'success';
$message = "File received: " . $_FILES['file']['name'];
}
else
{
$status = 'failed';
$message = "No file received.";
}
$reply = "<response>"
."<status>" . $status . "</status>"
."<message>" . $message . "</message>"
."</response>";
echo $reply;
?>
I am establishing a RAW connection over port 80 on putty, and making the POST request like this:
POST /file_post.php HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 212
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------8ce9826eb81af6a
-----------------------8ce9826eb81af6a
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; filename="test.txt"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
TestData
-----------------------8ce9826eb81af6a--
Reponse received

Answer 1

This is Chunked Transfer Encoding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding
You can send request in http 1.0 instead of 1.1 to avoid this or you can decode it easily (check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding#Example ) really easy to decode ,
Or use php-curl, it will automatically decode the response for you.