Illegal character in authority at index 21

[AkashB23]

Multiple services in our system that depend on either netty client or web client see an intermittent failure related to the illegal character in authority at index 21 without much information on any possible illegal character in the URL as printed in stack trace

Caused by: java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in authority at index 21: http://localhost:8080/req/path
 at java.base/java.net.URI$Parser.fail(Unknown Source)
 at java.base/java.net.URI$Parser.parseAuthority(Unknown Source)
 at java.base/java.net.URI$Parser.parseHierarchical(Unknown Source)
 at java.base/java.net.URI$Parser.parse(Unknown Source)
 at java.base/java.net.URI.<init>(Unknown Source)
 at java.base/java.net.URI.create(Unknown Source)
	at reactor.netty.http.HttpOperations.resolvePath(HttpOperations.java:416)

the index 21 is next char after the port, the static string added in HttpOperations:419

from the stack, we don't see any illegal char at index 21, it's very intermittent, and not able to reproduce any thoughts on this. can it be any character that may be added internally by the netty client that's not visible in logs as many services have the same exception at the same index?

[violetagg]

@AkashB23 You don't specify the Reactor Netty version, so I will comment on the latest version of HttpOperations

the index 21 is next char after the port, the static string added in HttpOperations:419

If this is the suspicious row then you can see that it is guarded by if (tempUri.charAt(0) == '/') {, so I don't see how something can be added in addition to what we have, the next call is URI.create

reactor-netty/reactor-netty-http/src/main/java/reactor/netty/http/HttpOperations.java

Lines 415 to 420 in abf21e6

	if (tempUri.charAt(0) == '/') {
	if (tempUri.length() == 1) {
	return tempUri;
	}
	tempUri = "http://localhost:8080" + tempUri;
	}

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[AkashB23]

yes exactly, thats the confusion here since the error specified failed authority validation which is just a string added at the line specified, how can it be failing with illegal char at 21

[github-actions]

If you would like us to look at this issue, please provide the requested information. If the information is not provided within the next 7 days this issue will be closed.

[violetagg]

yes exactly, thats the confusion here since the error specified failed authority validation which is just a string added at the line specified, how can it be failing with illegal char at 21

We can receive the full URI in the format "http://localhost:8080/", in this case we will not do any transformation and will try to parse it with URI.create, if there is some not printable character, it is possible that URI.create fails and the exception doesn't show the character.

You can extend the Reactor Netty pipeline and add a custom ChannelHandler where you can inspect the URI before it reaches Reactor Netty 's HttpOperations#resolvePath.