TypeError: The header content contains invalid characters

Summary

I recently added a method to the Object prototype and a day later spent a couple of hours fighting with uploads that mysteriously stopped working

Simplest Example to Reproduce

the following works fine:

const fs = require('fs');
const request = require('request');

var url = 'http://localhost:8000/';
var formData = { script: fs.createReadStream('t.txt') };
request.post({url, formData}, (err, resp, body) => {
        console.log(err || 'ok');
});

however, this fails:

const fs = require('fs');
const request = require('request');

Object.prototype.XYZ = function() {
    return 0;
}
var url = 'http://localhost:8000/';
var formData = { script: fs.createReadStream('t.txt') };
request.post({url, formData}, (err, resp, body) => {
        console.log(err || 'ok');
});

interestingly, it seems to be the newlines in the body of the method that break the code i.e. defining the method this way does not express the problem:

Object.prototype.XYZ = function() { return 0; }

Expected Behavior

what I would expect happen is that any methods described in the prototype are not considered as headers

Current Behavior

the call fails with the following stack trace:

TypeError: The header content contains invalid characters
    at ClientRequest.setHeader (_http_outgoing.js:374:11)
    at new ClientRequest (_http_client.js:131:14)
    at Object.request (http.js:26:10)
    at Request.start (/Users/ekkis/dev/node_modules/request/request.js:748:32)
    at Request.write (/Users/ekkis/dev/node_modules/request/request.js:1466:10)
    at FormData.ondata (internal/streams/legacy.js:16:26)
    at emitOne (events.js:96:13)
    at FormData.emit (events.js:191:7)
    at FormData.CombinedStream.write (/Users/ekkis/dev/node_modules/combined-stream/lib/combined_stream.js:118:8)
    at FormData.CombinedStream._pipeNext (/Users/ekkis/dev/node_modules/combined-stream/lib/combined_stream.js:106:8)

Possible Solution

I’m guessing somewhere the code is doing a for (k in o) when it should be doing something like Object.keys(o).forEach(function(k) {}) and that needs fixing

Context

I’m unable to post a form to a listening server. I believe it may be related to this issue https://github.com/request/request/issues/2367 but different in its genesis

Your Environment

software	version
request	2.27.0
node	7.7.2
npm	4.1.2
Operating System	OSX 10.11.6

[ekkis]

the problem isn’t spaces. it’s newlines, because they’re meaningful to headers

[sirajpathan]

I solved this problem by trimming white spaces from input data of headers.