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classification
Title: HTTP request-line parsing splits on Unicode whitespace
Type: behavior Stage: patch review
Components: Library (Lib), Unicode Versions: Python 3.9, Python 3.8, Python 3.7
process
Status: open Resolution:
Dependencies: Superseder:
Assigned To: Nosy List: ezio.melotti, tburke, vstinner
Priority: normal Keywords: patch

Created on 2018-06-26 18:39 by tburke, last changed 2022-04-11 14:59 by admin.

Pull Requests
URL Status Linked Edit
PR 7932 open tburke, 2018-06-26 18:42
Messages (2)
msg320507 - (view) Author: Tim Burke (tburke) * Date: 2018-06-26 18:39 
This causes (admittedly, buggy) clients that would work with a Python 2 server to stop working when the server upgrades to Python 3. To demonstrate, run `python2.7 -m SimpleHTTPServer 8027` in one terminal and `curl -v http://127.0.0.1:8027/你好` in another -- curl reports

    *   Trying 127.0.0.1...
    * TCP_NODELAY set
    * Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 8027 (#0)
    > GET /你好 HTTP/1.1
    > Host: 127.0.0.1:8027
    > User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
    > Accept: */*
    >
    * HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
    < HTTP/1.0 404 File not found
    < Server: SimpleHTTP/0.6 Python/2.7.10
    < Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 17:23:25 GMT
    < Content-Type: text/html
    < Connection: close
    <
    <head>
    <title>Error response</title>
    </head>
    <body>
    <h1>Error response</h1>
    <p>Error code 404.
    <p>Message: File not found.
    <p>Error code explanation: 404 = Nothing matches the given URI.
    </body>
    * Closing connection 0

...while repeating the experiment with `python3.6 -m http.server 8036` and `curl -v http://127.0.0.1:8036/你好` gives

    *   Trying 127.0.0.1...
    * TCP_NODELAY set
    * Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 8036 (#0)
    > GET /你好 HTTP/1.1
    > Host: 127.0.0.1:8036
    > User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
    > Accept: */*
    >
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <html>
        <head>
            <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
            <title>Error response</title>
        </head>
        <body>
            <h1>Error response</h1>
            <p>Error code: 400</p>
            <p>Message: Bad request syntax ('GET /ä½\xa0好 HTTP/1.1').</p>
            <p>Error code explanation: HTTPStatus.BAD_REQUEST - Bad request syntax or unsupported method.</p>
        </body>
    </html>
    * Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact

Granted, a well-behaved client would have quoted the UTF-8 '你好' as '%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD' (in which case everything would have behaved as expected), but RFC 7230 is pretty clear that the request-line should be SP-delimited. While it notes that "recipients MAY instead parse on whitespace-delimited word boundaries and, aside from the CRLF terminator, treat any form of whitespace as the SP separator", it goes on to say that "such whitespace includes one or more of the following octets: SP, HTAB, VT (%x0B), FF (%x0C), or bare CR" with no mention of characters like the (ISO-8859-1 encoded) non-breaking space that caused the 400 response.

FWIW, there was a similar unicode-separators-are-not-the-right-separators bug in header parsing a while back: https://bugs.python.org/issue22233
msg320529 - (view) Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) * (Python committer) Date: 2018-06-27 00:42 
isspace() is also true for another non-ASCII character: U+0085 (b'\x85').

>>> ''.join(chr(i) for i in range(256) if chr(i).isspace())
'\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f \x85\xa0'
History
Date User Action Args
2022-04-11 14:59:02adminsetgithub: 78154
2020-01-25 13:18:38cheryl.sabellasetversions: + Python 3.9, - Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6
2018-06-27 00:42:06vstinnersetmessages: + msg320529
2018-06-26 18:42:06tburkesetkeywords: + patch
stage: patch review
pull_requests: + pull_request7539
2018-06-26 18:39:29tburkecreate