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RFC 7230, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing", June 2014

Note: This RFC has been obsoleted by RFC 9110, RFC 9112

Note: This RFC has been updated by RFC 8615

Source of RFC: httpbis (wit)

Errata ID: 4189
Status: Held for Document Update
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT

Reported By: Simon Schueppel
Date Reported: 2014-11-26
Held for Document Update by: Barry Leiba
Date Held: 2015-04-22

Section 3.2 says:

     field-name     = token
     field-value    = *( field-content / obs-fold )
     field-content  = field-vchar [ 1*( SP / HTAB ) field-vchar ]
     field-vchar    = VCHAR / obs-text

     obs-fold       = CRLF 1*( SP / HTAB )
                    ; obsolete line folding
                    ; see Section 3.2.4

It should say:

     field-name     = token
     field-value    = *( field-content / obs-fold )
     field-content  = field-vchar [ 1*( SP / HTAB / field-vchar )
                      field-vchar ]
     field-vchar    = VCHAR / obs-text

     obs-fold       = OWS CRLF 1*( SP / HTAB )
                    ; obsolete line folding
                    ; see Section 3.2.4

Notes:

the field-value rule given in Section 3.2 will not recognize several strings recognized by specific header rules.

Examples:
- ", , ," recognized by legacy list rule
- "abrowser/0.001 (C O M M E N T)" recognized by User-Agent rule
- "gzip , chunked" recognized by Transfer-Encoding rule
- etc.

General Problem:
the specified field-value rule does not allow single field-vchar surrounded by whitespace anywhere

Further Notes:
-what the authors propably wanted to say:
a string of octets is a field-value if, and only if:
-it is *( field-vchar / SP / HTAB / obs-fold )
-if it is not empty, it starts and ends with field-vchar

-the suggested correction was designed according to these criteria

--------------------- Notes from verifier ---------------------
This has been edited from the original report after discussion, but even this is not right. There's more here than can be reasonably fixed in an errata report, and the proper fix needs to be done in a revision of the document -- hence, "Held for Document Update". Note that this *is* a valid report, and that a fix is needed. The one above is the best approach for now, and a better fix will be developed in 7230bis.

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