Why Is Get Request Poorly Formed?

Question

I am working with a server written in Active State Perl. Apparently, if a GET request is poorly formed, response results will return, but without their http headers. That is true in my case.

The Perl server listens for requests and send response using IO::Socket and SendHTTPRequest respectively.

So my question(s) are as follows. Is the following GET request invalid?

"GET ?CA=1&STREET=990%20MASS%20AVENUE&STREET2=UNIT%20A37&CITY=ARLINGTON&STATE=MA&ZIP=00000%20HTTP/1.1\r\n\r\n"

If the request is invalid how is it invalid? I would like to correct the format.

Apparently, ActiveState Perl thinks the request is not valid.

After the socket is correctly set up, the following code sends the request and waits for a response. If you need to see the socket setup including the host name, I'll edit this post and add at the bottom, but assume the socket is set up correctly.

size_t bytes_read = 0; /* Keeps per-loop read-count. */
char local_buf[INET_BUF_LEN] = {'\0'};
total_socket_read_bytesM = 0; /* Initialize module-scope read length */
write (socket_fdP, request_bufP, strlen(request_bufP));

while(TRUE)
{
  if(total_socket_read_bytesM  <= (read_bufP_len - 1))
  {
    bytes_read = read(socket_fdP, (local_buf + bytes_read), sizeof(local_buf));

    if (bytes_read == 0)
    {
      break;
    }
    else
    {
     total_socket_read_bytesM += bytes_read;
    }
  }
  else
  {
    break;
  }
}

I could punt, and not worry given I'm getting results back. However, I would like to write my C program to create a valid http GET request.

Epilogue:

This is what my working request looks like:

"GET /?CA=1&STREET=990%20MASS%20AVENUE&STREET2=UNIT%20A37&CITY=ARLINGTON&STATE=MA&ZIP=00000 HTTP/1.1\r\n\r\n"

Answer 1

The "Host" request field is required in HTTP/1.1, so your request is indeed invalid.

%20HTTP/1.1 is wrong too. There must be an actual space character after the resource name and before the HTTP version, not an escaped space.

I'm uncertain (and too lazy to check) whether the resource identifier can begin with ? in a request. If not then it should be /?CA=1....