HttpURLConnection with IPv6 link-local address

[Bruno Harbulot]

Hello,

I've been trying to use HttpURLConnection to connect to a web server using
its IPv6 link-local address.

There are two issues with this:

- HttpURLConnection work with URLs with the official % syntax (only the
informal one) for the scope ID (normally required for link-local addresses).

  Indeed, http://[fe80::a00:27ff:aaaa:aaaa%eth0]/ (for example) can be used
to send a request, but http://[fe80::a00:27ff:aaaa:aaaa%25eth0]/ will not
send a request at all ("java.net.SocketException: Network is
unreachable...").
  The difference is in the encoding of % (which separates the actual IP
address from the scope ID).
  RFC 6874 (Section 2) says, "According to URI syntax [RFC3986], "%" is
always treated as an escape character in a URI, so, according to the
established URI syntax [RFC3986] any occurrences of literal "%" symbols in
a URI MUST be percent-encoded and represented in the form "%25"."

- HttpURLConnection sends the scope ID in the Host header, i.e. "Host:
[fe80::a00:27ff:aaaa:aaaa%eth0]" instead of "Host:
[fe80::a00:27ff:aaaa:aaaa]".

  Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be allowed by RFC 4007, and this
causes Apache Httpd to return a 400 error status.
  (There are more details in this Apache Httpd issue:
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35122#c4 )

  The only workaround I've found was to set the Host header manually, but
this also requires enabling "sun.net.http.allowRestrictedHeaders".


These problems are present in the latest Java 7 release and in the Java 8
early release.

I'm not sure if this has already been reported or discussed. If not, would
it be possible to address it in future releases?

Best wishes,

Bruno.
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