Why does MSIE 8 report an HTTP status code of 12150?

Question

I'm having some problems with a weird HTTP status code in MSIE8.

I send an HTTP GET to the following URL:

 /cgi-bin/objectBrowser/snap.pl?file_key=28

From Fiddler, I can see that I'm getting the following Raw response:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 20:24:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 61

Location: /cgi-bin/objectBrowser/workWithSnap.pl?snapKey=32

This was generated using the following Perl:

print $cgi->header( -status => '302 Found' );
print "Location: /cgi-bin/objectBrowser/workWithSnap.pl?snapKey=$snap_key\n\n";

I'm using jQuery to access it, in the following way:

jQuery.ajax({
    type : "GET",
    url : "/cgi-bin/objectBrowser/file.pl?pmr=" + request.pmr
        + "&filename=" + request.filename,
    statusCode : {
        200 : function(file_info) {
            if (file_info.status == "parsing") {
            jQuery('div#updates').append('<div class="information">No snap yet, but file <i>has</i> been registered already.</div>');
            jQuery('div#updates').append('<div class="waiting">Awaiting job completion...</div>');
            jQuery.getJSON("/cgi-bin/objectBrowser/job.pl?file_key=" + file_info.file_key, function(job_info) {
            poll_for_job_completion(job_info);
                });
            } else {
            jQuery.ajax({
                type : "GET",
            url : "/cgi-bin/objectBrowser/snap.pl?file_key=" + file_info.file_key,
        statusCode : {
                302 : function(xhr) {
                jQuery('div#updates').append('<div class="information">Redirecting to snap</div>');
                            alert("302: "+ xhr.responseText);
                process_302(xhr.responseText);
                }
                    }
            });
        }
        },
        302 : function(xhr) {
            alert("302: "+ xhr.responseText);
        process_302(xhr.responseText);
        },
        404 : register_file
    }
});

Finally, I have the following to help with debug:

jQuery('body').ajaxComplete(function(e,a,o) {
    console.log('Event: %o\nXHR: %o\nOptions: %o',e,a,o);
    console.log(o.url);
    console.log(a.status);
    console.log(a.responseText);
});

This all works fine in Firefox and Chrome, but in MSIE, where I normally get a status of 302 in response to my request for snap.pl, I'm getting a response of 12150. The best hit I've found is on MSDN, which suggests that this is ERROR_HTTP_HEADER_NOT_FOUND... but the Headers look good to me.

I can't figure out what's going wrong here... does anyone see anything that I may be overlooking?

Answer 1

Problem solved!

The bug was the header generation.

The resulting HTTP header has a big gap in it and MSIE8 is interpreting Location as being in the body, not the header.

By using

print $cgi->redirect( -uri =>  "/cgi-bin/objectBrowser/workWithSnap.pl?snapKey=$snap_key");

the header is created correctly and I get sensible behaviour again

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 21:00:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: /cgi-bin/objectBrowser/workWithSnap.pl?snapKey=32
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8