Unencoded Location: header when redirecting

[Jim Nelson]

We’re seeing the following behavior in nginx 1.4.6:

* User navigates to location w/ spaces in the URL ("http://example.org/When%20Harry%20Met%20Sally").  The location points to a directory on the filesystem with spaces in its name ("/items/When Harry Met Sally”).

* nginx returns “301 Moved Permanently” with the Location: URL unencoded and a trailing slash added:

Location: http://example.org/When Harry Met Sally/

* Some software (i.e. PHP) will automatically follow the redirect, but because it expects an encoded Location: header, it sends exactly what was returned from the server.  (Note that curl, wget, and others will fixup unencoded Location: headers, but that’s not what HTTP spec requires.)

* nginx will normally process URLs with spaces in them, but because of its request parsing algorithm, it fails w/ a “400 Bad Request” when it sees the uppercase ‘H’ in “Harry” in the URL (https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/196?cversion=0&cnum_hist=2).

In other words, this is the transaction chain:

C: GET http://example.org/When%20Harry%20Met%20Sally HTTP/1.1

S: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
S: Location: http://example.org/When Harry Met Sally/

C: GET http://example.org/When Harry Met Sally/ HTTP/1.1

S: 400 Bad Request

I believe the 301 originates from within the nginx code itself (ngx_http_static_module.c:147-193?) and not from our rewrite rules.  As I read the HTTP spec, Location: must be encoded.

— Jim