Cypress: cy.request() errors when URL's path contains ’ character

[jennifer-shehane]

Current behavior:

Using a ’ character in the Path of the URL passed to cy.request() causes a TypeError: The header content contains invalid characters.

The apostrophe is not a ' apostrophe character, it's the ’ character. If I paste the same url into my Chrome browser - the url redirects correctly.

I tried a lot of other characters that did not cause any issue including some emojis 😅

Why is someone even doing this? Well @oak-wildwood was dynamically pulling content from our docs to generate urls then using cy.request() to visit them - so the generated URLs had the ’ character.

Stack trace

RequestError: TypeError: The header content contains invalid characters
    at new RequestError (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request-promise-core/lib/errors.js:14:15)
    at Request.plumbing.callback (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request-promise-core/lib/plumbing.js:87:29)
    at Request.RP$callback [as _callback] (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request-promise-core/lib/plumbing.js:46:31)
    at self.callback (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request/request.js:185:22)
    at emitOne (events.js:116:13)
    at Request.emit (events.js:211:7)
    at Request.start (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request/request.js:753:10)
    at Request.end (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request/request.js:1511:10)
    at end (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request/request.js:564:14)
    at Immediate.<anonymous> (/Users/jennifer/Library/Caches/Cypress/3.4.1/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/node_modules/request/request.js:578:7)
    at runCallback (timers.js:789:20)
    at tryOnImmediate (timers.js:751:5)
    at processImmediate [as _immediateCallback] (timers.js:722:5)

Desired behavior:

Requesting this url should not throw an invalid characters warning and should instead behave as Chrome does.

Steps to reproduce: (app code and test code)

it('test', () => {
  cy.request('https://on.cypress.io/key-differences#What-you’ll-learn') // fails
})

it('test a fake url too', () => {
  cy.request('http://’')             // works
  cy.request('http://google.com’')   // works
  cy.request('http://google.com/’')  // fails
})

Versions

Cypress 3.4.1 & 3.5.0 prerelease

[flotwig]

The root of the problem here is that you can't put a Unicode character in the HTTP request path or in the HTTP request headers. So the request that is made by:

cy.request('http://google.com/’')    

Looks like this:

GET /’

Host: google.com

Which is invalid, since it contains Unicode, and shouldn't be sent anyways.

encodeURIComponent('’') returns "%E2%80%99", so maybe the proper request would be this:

cy.request('http://google.com/%E2%80%99')    

---

Can we automatically do this for users somehow, without breaking existing behavior? Maybe by first running decodeURI on the URL to undo any percent-encoding the user has already done, and then running encodeURI to encode any special characters?

[ayandebbarman]

I am currently facing this same error as i am trying to verify through 1000s of links for places and many contains ' character. Any work around would be appreciated

[flotwig]

@ayandebbarman The issue is that Cypress does not encode the URL for you. You can use encodeURI to do this. So, instead of doing this:

cy.visit('http://google.com/’')

Do this:

cy.visit(encodeURI('http://google.com/’'))

[avallete]

I'm facing the same issue.

If no one already started working on this issue I would gladly submit a PR to fix it.

[flotwig]

@avallete Feel free to open a PR, let us know if you have any questions we can help with.

[cypress-bot[bot]]

The code for this is done in cypress-io/cypress#5813, but has yet to be released.
We'll update this issue and reference the changelog when it's released.

[cypress-bot[bot]]

Released in 3.8.0.