PHP Magazine

Usage of Zend_Http_Client is pretty straight-forward:

$client = new Zend_Http_Client($uri);
$client->request(Zend_Http_Client::HEAD); // HTTP HEAD request

However, today, on my Ubuntu box I had real problems as HTTP client constantly ended in segmentation fault (SIGTERM in apache logs). When debugging, I noticed that it does so only if $uri contains so called «unwise» characters, such as spaces, «{«, «}», «^» etc.

Going deeper, I reviewed the source code of Zend_Http_Client::setUri($uri) method, only to discover that it relies on Zend_Uri::factory($uri), to initialize the URLs. From there it was pretty simple. Zend_Uri is aware of «unwise» chars problem and disallows them by default (why exception thrown by Zend_Uri ended in SIGTERM is yet to discover, however). In order to allow such a characters:

Zend_Uri::setConfig(array('allow_unwise' => true));
$client = new Zend_Http_Client($uri); // $uri may contain unwise chars now

After issuing above instruction Zend_Uri accepts those unwisely formed URIs. Plus, you have to URL-encode white-spaces (i.e. make sure that white-spaces in query string, or actually in URI part after the host name are replaced with «%20″ char) to make them acceptable.

Further info available in offical documentation.

Please note, that I still think that having unreliable chars in URI is really bad practice. If you work with some system that already gone far on this path, it’s nice to have a method to actually consume such a wildly formed URIs. Kudos to Zend_Uri maintainers!