[Web-SIG] Chunked Tranfer encoding on request content.

[Robert Brewer]

Graham Dumpleton wrote:
> In CherryPy, when it sees that the Transfer-Encoding
> is set to 'chunked' while parsing the HTTP headers,
> it will at that point, even before it has called
> start_response for the WSGI application, read in all
> content from the body of the request.
> 
> CherryPy reads in the content like this for two reasons.
> The first is so that it can then determine the overall
> length of the content that was available and set the
> CONTENT_LENGTH value in the WSGI environ.

Right; IIRC the rfile just hangs if you try to read
past Content-Length. Perhaps that can be fixed inside
socket.makefile somewhere?

> The second reason is so that it can read in any
> additional HTTP header fields that may occur in
> the trailer after the last data chunk and also
> incorporate them into the WSGI environ.

Yeah; I didn't see any other way to get Trailers into
the environ. Perhaps that can be added to WSGI 2.0?

I also just haven't had time to write a dechunker
which worked on the fly. Patches welcome ;)

> When chunked transfer encoding is not used, such a
> 100 continue response would in a good WSGI server
> only be sent when the WSGI application called read()
> on wsgi.input for the first time.

Sounds reasonable. Again, patches welcome ;)

> Note that I am assuming here that 100 continue is
> still usable in conjunction with chunked transfer
> encoding. In CherryPy WSGI server it only actually
> sends the 100 continue after it attempts to try
> and read content in the presence of a chunked
> transfer encoding header. Not sure if this is
> actually a bug or not.

It looks like a bug. The Expect header should be
checked before decode_chunked (at least until the
100 response can be moved inside read()).

Thanks for catching those!


Robert Brewer
System Architect
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org
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