204 (No Content) responses without content-type crashes django if UA is Internet Explorer

[juan@…]

A HTTP 204 response (no content) doesn't return an entity-body in the request, but Django is forced to include a content-type header because of .../django/http/utils.py fix_IE_for_vary that expects that header to be present.

Let's say we have a HttpResponse subclass like the following:

from django.http import HttpResponse

class HttpEmptyResponse(HttpResponse):
    """
    Special HTTP reponse with no content, just headers.

    The content operations are ignored.
    """
    def __init__(self, content='', mimetype=None, status=None, content_type=None):
        super(HttpEmptyResponse, self).__init__(status=204)

        # although we don't say a content-type, base class sets a
        # default one -- remove it, we're not returning content
        if 'content-type' in self._headers:
            del self._headers['content-type']

    def _set_content(self, value):
        pass

    def _get_content(self, value):
        pass

Django crashes if the UA is not Internet Explorer, otherwise it works perfectly.

References:

• content-type: ​http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-7.2.1
• 204 responses: ​http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.2.5

[juan@…]

Django crashes if the UA is not Internet Explorer, otherwise it works perfectly.

Sorry for that!

[kenth]

patch with tests

[kenth]

Added tests to confirm bug & patch.

[Aymeric Augustin]

In [17196]:

Fixed #16632 -- Crash on responses without Content-Type with IE. Thanks juan for the report and kenth for the patch.

[Aymeric Augustin]

In [17198]:

[1.3.X] Fixed #16632 -- Crash on responses without Content-Type with IE. Backport of r17196.