StatusText

StatusText is a term used in computer networking and web development to describe the human-readable message that accompanies an HTTP status code in a response. It is typically presented as a brief phrase such as "OK" for a 200 status or "Not Found" for a 404, and it is often exposed by web APIs and HTTP client libraries as a statusText property or field.

In the HTTP protocol, responses include a status line consisting of a numeric code and a reason phrase. The reason phrase provides a human-readable description of the status. However, the presence and content of this phrase are not strictly standardized across protocols and implementations. In newer transports like HTTP/2, the reason phrase is not required and some servers or clients may omit it, leading to an empty or non‑standard statusText in practice.

Web APIs and libraries commonly expose statusText for convenience. For example, the Fetch API’s Response object includes status and statusText, as do older XMLHttpRequest-based code and many HTTP client libraries (such as Axios). While statusText can be helpful for displaying messages to users, it is not a reliable source for programmatic logic, because the exact text can vary, be localized, or be omitted.

Practice typically emphasizes relying on the numeric status code for control flow, using statusText mainly for user-facing messages or debugging. StatusText can reflect server configuration and can differ between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 deployments.