[Twisted-web] [PATCH] basic authentication and delimiter support for web.client

[James Y Knight]

On May 11, 2004, at 4:11 PM, Bryan Larsen wrote:
> 2) allow the delimiter to be changed from '\r\n' to '\n'.  Because of
> bugs in browsers, all servers send '\r\n' instead of the technically
> legal '\n'.  But that's a pain for nph-sh scripts, so here's a quick
> hack to change the delimiter.  To be legal, HttpClient should handle
> both '\n' and '\r\n' simultaneously, but LineReceiver does not provide
> this facility, so I'm using this hack instead.


Excuuuuuse me? HTTP *requires* CRLF to terminate header lines. "\n" is 
never ever ever a legal header delimiter! The last bit of the HTTP 1.1 
spec, under 19.3 "Tolerant Applications", does allow you to interpret 
incoming \n as an end of line:
"The line terminator for message-header fields is the sequence CRLF.  
However, we recommend that applications, when parsing such headers,  
recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore the leading CR."

But that's not even a SHOULD, it's just a "we recommend", so I think it 
ought to be ignored. Anyone broken enough to send \n deserves what's 
coming to them.

James