[New-bugs-announce] [issue31076] http.server should correctly handle HTTP 1.1 responses without a content-length

[Tom Forbes]

New submission from Tom Forbes:

The builtin http.server module does not support HTTP keep-alive when sending a response without a content-length. This causes any clients to hang waiting on more response data, while the server hangs waiting for the client to send another request. This is documented (https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html#http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler.protocol_version), but it is confusing.

As far as I can tell the fix would be pretty simple: If no content-length header is set then close the connection regardless of the keep-alive header (Keep-alive is advisory and servers can close the connection at-will, regardless of what the client sends).

If a response contains an inaccurate content-length header there is nothing we can do, but if none is present the server (and clients) should not just hang.

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components: Library (Lib)
messages: 299471
nosy: Tom Forbes
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: http.server should correctly handle HTTP 1.1 responses without a content-length
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue31076>
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