One of the nice things about writing a blog is getting to say 'oh, oops, I was a dumbass, let me fix that'. Today I have to own up to a big example of this.

Back at the start of WanderingThoughts, I wrote an entry where I complained in part:

In theory the absolute URL should include the port (unless it's the default). In practice, every program I've tried gleefully adds the port itself if it is a non-standard port and you're referring to the same hostname.

I was a moron.

The Host: header in HTTP requests includes the port when the port is a non-standard one (and some programs throw it in even when you're on port 80, as I found out later). My code looked more or less like:

newuri = "http://%s:%d" % (HostHeader, MyPort) + relUrl

When programs gave me real Host: headers, where HostHeader included both hostname and port, I effectively doubled the port and things naturally exploded. Had I printed the actual Host: header that programs were handing DWiki I would have seen my mistake immediately, but instead I was too confidant that I knew what was going on and didn't bother; I trusted my testing with hand-crafted HTTP requests, where I'd gotten the Host: header wrong and so the result looked right.

I only found all this out months later when I was doing something else with the Host: header that blew up because I didn't know to expect the ':port' on the end; that time I dumped debugging information, partly because the failure was more mysterious.

My mistake is all the more embarrassing because, contrary to what I wrote in the original entry, the proper behavior is described in black and white in the HTTP 1.1 RFC's section on the Host header. I am not sure what RFCs I read at the time of the original entry, but evidently I didn't read the important one.