Re: [http-state] Ticket 11: Character encoding for non-ASCII cookies values

[Mark Pauley <[e-mail]>]

You're correct, we do allow those.  What I'm worried about though is that valid UTF-8 sequences will contain \r\n .   In any case, writing good parsers for a variable-length is really tough.

To give you a sense of what Safari will accept, we'll accept the following for names or values in cookies:

CTL = 		[\x00-\x1F\x7F];
NETSCAPE_SPECIAL = ("," | ";" | "=" | SPACE | HTAB);
NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR = (CTL | NETSCAPE_SPECIAL);
NETSCAPE_CHAR = ((CHAR \ NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR) | COMMA_NOSPACE);
COMMA_NOSPACE = ((",")(CHAR \ (SPACE | HTAB | ";")));
NETSCAPE_VAL = (CHAR \ NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR)((NETSCAPE_CHAR | SPACE | HTAB)* NETSCAPE_CHAR)?;


And NETSCAPE_VAL is effectively our TOKEN.
We allow for quoted values, but those still reject the CTL class of character.

So, we certainly will choke on many UTF-8 character sequences.  In that case, we'll just ditch the cookie header as a whole.


One of the main problems so far with cookies has been that the Date spec used in the Netscape implementation clashes with the standard of HTTP to separate values in headers by a comma token.  That is I believe, some sites wish to set multiple cookies by using a comma separator whereas the comma is also used as part of an unquoted field.  If we can verify that nobody is actually trying to set multiple cookies per Set-Cookies header, then we can easily pull this functionality and be a bit more blind to the character set of the Set-Cookie header value.


On Mar 3, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Mark Pauley wrote:
> 
>> In the future, we ought to treat these as opaque octets.  However, the current cookie spec would lead me to believe that we should reject any cookies that contain control characters, which would be most non-ascii UTF-8 sequences, right?
> 
> Isn't the RFC2616 'token' a bit too strict for cookie-value ? The netscape spec is _very_ liberal ("a sequence of characters excluding semi-colon, comma and white space") so the current wording is a great deal more restrictive.
> 
> Don't cookie implementations already allow and use for example ()<>:@? etc?
> 
> -- 
> 
> / daniel.haxx.se