Re: multiline HTTP headers support in header()

On 2 July 2014 18:24, Solar Designer <solar@openwall.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 03, 2014 at 02:09:05AM +0100, Andrea Faulds wrote: >> On 3 Jul 2014, at 02:05, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com> wrote: >> > So IE violates the RFC by misparsing the multiline headers? I'd say it's >> > an one more reason to never use IE :) RFC 7230 indeed proposes to remove >> > this capability, but it's not accepted yet, as far as I can see. We can >> > probably drop this immediately for 5.6, for previous versions I'm not >> > sure if anybody uses this feature. So if anybody knows any use of it, >> > please tell, otherwise it's probably a good idea to kill it for stable >> > versions too. >> >> As I?ve had to implement HTTP myself for a particular non-PHP application, I?ve read the >> original HTTP/1.1 RFC. As far as I know, multi-line headers are semantically equivalent to >> single-line headers, so couldn?t we just ?flatten? them automatically? It shouldn?t break anything >> unless you?re deliberately misusing header(). > > I think we could, and your analysis looks correct to me, but I see no > good enough reason to go for the extra complexity. Having a function > defined in a more complicated manner and implemented with more code is > asking for more bugs and mis-interactions. I'd tend to agree: if we're going to do this, let's just rip the band-aid off completely. I've got a quick and dirty patch at https://github.com/LawnGnome/php-src/compare/remove-multiline-headers?expand=1 that does this, and applies cleanly against every branch from 5.4 to master. I'm not so sure about the versions this should be applied too, though: my current inclination is to only apply it to master and maybe 5.6 if the RMs agreed. While it's a very, very small BC break (and hence one I'm OK with in a minor branch like 5.6), I don't think we should do this in a 5.4 or 5.5 point release — recent history (the unserialize() hack) suggests that it's a nightmare to document and explain those sorts of breaks. Adam