I’m integrating with an old SMSC server that sends non-standard HTTP headers like:

-ERROR : ERROR

This obviously violates HTTP syntax, so reqwest (via hyper → httparse) fails to parse the response. I’ve confirmed that httparse has an ignore_invalid_headers configuration flag, and newer versions of hyper expose an ignore_invalid_headers(true) option on the HTTP/1 Builder.

However:

• reqwest doesn’t seem to expose that configuration for clients, and

• it looks like hyper hard-codes ignore_invalid_headers = false internally for its client path.

My goal is to make reqwest (or hyper) ignore invalid headers — e.g., skip lines like -ERROR : ERROR — just for this project, without forking too much code.

So my questions are:

1. Is there a supported way to enable ignore_invalid_headers in reqwest’s client stack?

2. If not, where exactly in hyper should I patch to set ignore_invalid_headers = true for HTTP/1 client connections?

3. Is there a recommended approach for handling malformed headers from legacy systems like this — perhaps via a custom connector, proxy, or a local [patch.crates-io] override of httparse?

Context

• reqwest 0.12.x (which uses hyper 1.x)

• The SMSC returns valid HTTP status lines and body but includes malformed header lines like -ERROR : ERROR.

Any insight into the cleanest or most maintainable way to make reqwest tolerant to such legacy responses would be appreciated.

4 posts - 2 participants

Read full topic