Tomcat Invalid Character in Request

Note

It is always better to follow the standard to encode URL at the client side first to prevent this problem from happening at all.

Error Log

2018-10-10 19:29:55.522 INFO 21872 --- [nio-8080-exec-1] o.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor : Error parsing HTTP request header Note: further occurrences of HTTP header parsing errors will be logged at DEBUG level.

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid character found in the request target. The valid characters are defined in RFC 7230 and RFC 3986

Solution 1

Downgrade Tomcat to 8.0 or use another web container

Solution 2

Spring boot 1.x

You could use simply swap out the embedded tomcat with a 8.0 version.

<xml>
    <properties>
        <tomcat.version>8.0.47</tomcat.version>
    </properties>
    <dependencies>
        ...
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
            <artifactId>tomcat-juli</artifactId>
            <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        ...
    </dependencies>
</xml>

Spring boot 2.x

You could swap the tomcat with a jetty.

<xml>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jetty</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</xml>

Zhenyang Hua