header value null termination?

[Steven Hartland]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Maxim Dounin" <mdounin at mdounin.ru>
To: <nginx-devel at nginx.org>
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2014 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: header value null termination?


> Hello!
> 
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 12:30:22AM +0100, Steven Hartland wrote:
> 
>> I'm creating a module in which I needed to set some
>> of the standard headers e.g. Content-Range and Range.
>> 
>> Looking through the core source code the standard way
>> to do this seems to be something like this:-
>> 
>> r->headers_in.range->value.len =
>>    ngx_sprintf(r->headers_in.range->value.data,
>>        "bytes %O-%O/%O",
>>        range->start, range->end - 1,
>>        r->headers_out.content_length_n)
>>        - r->headers_in.range->value.data;
>> 
>> This appears to write a string to value.data which
>> is not \0 terminated hence when interacting with
>> functions such as ngx_http_range_parse unpredictable
>> behaviour follows as it expects the range header to
>> be null terminated.
>> 
>> So the question is:-
>> 
>> Should header values be null terminated or should
>> functions such as ngx_http_range_parse be updated
>> to deal with non-null terminated strings?
> 
> The answer is: no.
> 
> In general, strings in nginx are not null terminated, and there is 
> no need to null-terminated them.  In some cases though strings are 
> guaranteed to be null-terminated - notably, configuration 
> directive arguments are always null-terminated, as well as input 
> headers.  The ngx_http_range_parse() uses an input header from 
> r->headers_in, and it's guaranteed to be null-terminated.
> 
> The problem is in the "sample" code you've provided though: it 
> tries to modify input headers in r->headers_in.  This is wrong 
> thing to do.

Thanks for the confirming all input headers should be null
terminated, thats good to hear as thats what I did :)

The task I'm trying to achieve is quite a strange thing to be doing,
essentially I'm sending different headers to subrequests than the
original client sent.

I seems the only way to achieve this is to alter sr->headers_in
as in the sample; unless there's another way to do this?

As part of this project I've got a patch which adds the ability
to do range requests from 206 responses to
ngx_http_range_filter_module, is this something that you would
consider upstreaming?

    Regards
    Steve