Konstantin Kolinko wrote:
2014-02-03 André Warnier <a...@ice-sa.com>:
André Warnier wrote:
Chris,
a note :
Christopher Schultz wrote:
...
Without quoting, unquoted Cookie names and values may be any US-ASCII
character from 0x32 - 0x7e except for any of ("(" | ")" | "<" | ">" |
"@" | "," | ";" | ":" | "\" | <"> | "/" | "[" | "]" | "?" | "=" | "{"
| "}" | SP | HT). None of the characters above are within that range,
so the cookie value must be quoted. (It looks to me like Cookie names
must always be in US-ASCII... I didn't think that was the case but I'm
not motivated to track-down every word of the spec looking for
justification).
What is the character encoding of the request? What client are you
using? Who created the cookie in the first place?
I did the tracking down of the (tortuous) specs, and come to this :
1) the ISO-8859-1 character set includes "é" (Catalan and other languages)
(*)
2) the US-ASCII character set is a subset of ISO-8859-1, and does not
include "é".
3) The default character set for HTTP 1.1 is ISO-8859-1, as stated
explicitly and implicitly in various places in RFC 2616 [1].
However, RFC 2616 does not define the "Cookie" nor "Set-Cookie" headers,
and it also does not specifically indicate which character set should be
used for HTTP Request/Response header values. It refers for that to MIME
(RFC 822), which talks only about US-ASCII.
2) The "Cookie" and "Set-Cookie" headers seem to be subsequently and
lastly defined in RFC 6265 [2].
In section 4.1.1 [3], the syntax of these headers is defined, as :
cookie-pair = cookie-name "=" cookie-value
cookie-name = token
cookie-value = *cookie-octet / ( DQUOTE *cookie-octet DQUOTE )
cookie-octet = %x21 / %x23-2B / %x2D-3A / %x3C-5B / %x5D-7E
; US-ASCII characters excluding CTLs,
; whitespace DQUOTE, comma, semicolon,
; and backslash
token = <token, defined in [RFC2616], Section 2.2>
Thus, it seems that you are right, and that a cookie *value* can
(regrettably still) only consist of US-ASCII characters (not including "é"
thus).
(I cannot find in the specs a way to quote a non-US-ASCII character
either; that's apparently only allowed in parts defined as "comments")
(It is stated somewhere else in RFC 6265 that it is recommended to encode
the Cookie value via e.g. Base64, if it were to potentially contain non
US-ASCII characters).
The cookie name is a "token", and the definition of "token" sends us back
to RFC2616.
In "2.2 Basic Rules", RFC2616 states :
token = 1*<any CHAR except CTLs or separators>
separators = "(" | ")" | "<" | ">" | "@"
| "," | ";" | ":" | "\" | <">
| "/" | "[" | "]" | "?" | "="
| "{" | "}" | SP | HT
...
CHAR = <any US-ASCII character (octets 0 - 127)>
CTL = <any US-ASCII control character
(octets 0 - 31) and DEL (127)>
So, this all would tend to show that you are right, and that Cookie names
(as well as values) can only consist of US-ASCII characters, and that "é" is
thus not allowed (without some form of encoding that would represent it as a
sequence of US-ASCII characters).
Which, in my personal opinion is a lasting p-i-t-a and shame. And I
cannot imagine how it can be nowadays that nobody has yet gotten around to
proposing a HTTP 2.0 RFC where the default character set would be Unicode,
UTF-8 encoded, for everything excluding maybe header names. But that's
neither here nor there.
To get back to the original OP's question thus, it seems to me that
- Tomcat 7.x would not be in violation of the specs, if it indeed rejects
a Cookie header containing any non-US-ASCII character (whether in the cookie
name or value).
- That the error message could be improved ("é" is not a control
character, it's just invalid here)
- but that the real fix for the OP may be to Base64-encode the cookie
value before sending it to the browser.
That's also because it may happen one day that even a browser which
respects the specs to the letter (one never knows), could reject a value
like : "abcé","abc","abc","abc","abc","abc","abc","abc","abc";
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc2616
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc6265
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc6265#section-4.1.1
As an appendix, and triggered by another post to this list, here is another
way of encoding HTTP header values :
Cookie: ACE_COOKIE=R660302447; TD3World=R760446058
SM_TRANSACTIONID:
=?UTF-8?B?MGE2NDA2MDEtNDAzMy01MjdjYzlkMy0wMDBhLTJjMWI0NjJi?=
SM_AUTHTYPE: =?UTF-8?B?QXV0bw==?=
SM_SDOMAIN: =?UTF-8?B?LnRveW90YS1ldXJvcGUuY29t?=
In this case, the cookie values are encoded using a "MIME extension" scheme
which indicates (between =? ? ?) prior to a string's value, the character
set/encoding in which the subsequent string is to be interpreted.
This is not explicitly mentioned in any of the above references, but as I
recall, this is part of another series of RFC's, maybe starting at this one
:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2184
Now how this works out (also browser-side) with Cookie headers composed of
cookie names and values, I couldn't say.
RFC 2616
also says the following on page 16:
The TEXT rule is only used for descriptive field contents and values
that are not intended to be interpreted by the message parser. Words
of *TEXT MAY contain characters from character sets other than ISO-
8859-1 [22] only when encoded according to the rules of RFC 2047
[14].
TEXT = <any OCTET except CTLs,
but including LWS>
RFC 2047 is also referenced in Javadoc for HttpServletResponse.setHeader()
The "B" encoding used in an example above is one of encodings allowed
by RFC2047 ch.4.1.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt
Yes, but it never says anywhere that a "cookie value" may contain "*TEXT". Explicitly, it
only mentions "*cookie-octet".
And, what does it all mean browser-side, particularly for Cookies ?
Most browsers for example have a "show cookies" function, where they will display the
cookie name, value, and other attributes separately.
The above encoding scheme is meant to encode the whole "HTTP header value" part.
For example, if the server sends a response header like :
Set-Cookie: =?UTF-8?B?(something)
and the encoded part of that header would be a "cookie-name=cookie-value"
string,
would the average browser decode that string properly in a cookie-name,
cookie-value, etc. ?
And how would that same browser send back this cookie later, in a "Cookie:" HTTP request
header to the server ?
Similarly-encoded ?
Similarly, the Tomcat Wiki article to which Mark pointed us earlier, talks about many
aspects of cookies, but not very much in detail about the precise subject of the original
OP's post, which was the characters that could be used in a Cookie value, respectively for
Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7. (And according to the OP, there is a difference in that respect
between Tomcat 6.x and Tomcat 7.x; I haven't checked).
In general, in the case of HTTP and character sets, there is such a spaghetti-bowl of
mutually-referencing RFC's, that it is really not easy to know what one "SHOULD" or
"SHOULD NOT" do in the end.
And if interpret the Wiki article correctly, then it seems that now there is also a HTML-5
recommendation to add to the mix.
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