header() allows arbitrary status codes

another thing, it wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point want to
emulate some IIS-specific codes in PHP, like
header("HTTP/1.1 401.3 Unauthorized due to ACL on resource.");

it'd be a shame if PHP literally cannot send IIS-errorcodes

I don't think that this works right now, and I'm not absolute convinced
that we should add support for this. It seems to me that this violates
RFC 7230, section 3.1.2[1].

After consideration, I agree, though, that it's better to not restrict
the range to 100-599, and maybe we should allow for more or less than 3
digits, and just catch potential overflow.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7230#section-3.1.2

Christoph

On Thu, 23 Dec 2021 at 16:40, Hans Henrik Bergan divinity76@gmail.com
wrote:

sometime in the future HTTP 6xx will be defined, and we'll have to add a
big warning to the header()/http_respons_code() pages like
"Warning: HTTP 6.x.x is only supported in PHP >= x.x.x and PHP <=8.1.x",
and library developers have to add fugly code like
`if(PHP_VERSION_MAJOR >= X || (PHP_VERSION_MAJOR <=8 && PHP_VERSION_MINOR
<= 1){http_response_code(6xx);}else{
trigger_error("your php version cannot use http 6xx");
}

i'd prefer if we didn't restrict the header ranges

On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 6:59 PM Christoph M. Becker cmbecker69@gmx.de
wrote:

Hi all,

a while ago it has been reported[1] that our header() function
actually
allows arbitrary status codes, which may even overflow. Of course,
that
makes no sense, since the status code is supposed to be a three digit
code. So this ticket has been followed up by a pull request[2], and
Jakub suggested to further restrict the status code to be in range
100 -
599.

Personally, I don't like restricting the status code to a number in the
100-599 range. As far as I know, RFC 7230 doesn't mandate anything
beyond
the requirement of 3 digits and while 7231 may only specify semantics
for
1xx-5xx, that doesn't mean there isn't a legitimate use-case in custom
or
internal applications for status codes outside the usual semantics.

The overflow part is a legit bug which can and should be fixed, but I'd
at
least question whether a user should be obliged to stick to conventional
HTTP semantics via the header() function, or even a strictly conformant
implementation of the standards defined 7320. Maybe this behaviour
could be
default but overridable via a new, fourth optional parameter or
something,
I don't know...but I can easily imagine someone having a legitimate
context
in which they want to send status codes outside the usual range
representing custom semantics.

I think its safe to say we should restrict the overflow parts.

As for boundaries; I don't know who is or isn't using their own custom
status codes. It's unlikely, but entirely possible. As such, this is
considered a BC break.

If we apply restrictions to a minor release, then upgrading will be harder
for 8.2 if we include this in the next release.

You could say 98% of people are using standard ranges for status codes,
but
we do have to always take into account the 2% on our decisions.

Thanks.

Since this could break some pathological cases, I wanted to ask
whether
anybody objects to this change for the master branch (i.e. PHP 8.2).

[1] https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=81645
[2] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/7676

Christoph

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