ruby / ruby/webrick

Retire superfluous quoting of Content-Type: charset [RFC7230]

Open Beginner friendly
#189 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
327
Forks
112
Avg merge
4h 2m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

uri = URI('http://127.0.0.1:8080')
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.hostname, uri.port)
http.response_body_encoding = true
http.send_request('GET', uri.request_uri)
/opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/net-http-0.9.1/lib/net/http/response.rb:381:in 'String#force_encoding': unknown encoding name - "UTF-8" (ArgumentError)
    @body.force_encoding(enc) if enc
	from /opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/net-http-0.9.1/lib/net/http/response.rb:381:in 'Net::HTTPResponse#read_body'
$ curl -I http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Server: WEBrick/1.9.2 (Ruby/4.0.1/2026-01-13)

$ open https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6

[3.2.6](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6). Field Value Components
quoted-string = DQUOTE *( qdtext / quoted-pair ) DQUOTE
A sender SHOULD NOT generate a quoted-pair in a quoted-string except where necessary

$ open https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml

irb> Encoding.list.flat_map { it.name.delete('0-9A-Za-z').chars }.tally.sort_by(&:first).to_h
=> {"-" => 86, "_" => 1}
$ git diff
diff --git a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
index 4e759d8..2de7785 100644
--- a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
+++ b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
@@ -489,3 +489,3 @@ module WEBrick
         else
-          type << "; charset=\"#{enc.name}\""
+          type << "; charset=#{enc.name}"
         end
http.send_request('GET', uri.request_uri)
# #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Read lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb around the charset construction near line 489, then reproduce the issue with the Net::HTTP request shown in the report. Verify the Content-Type charset formatting against RFC 7230 and confirm the request completes without the reported unknown-encoding error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
92/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.