Retire superfluous quoting of Content-Type: charset [RFC7230]

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
92/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
ruby
Domain
backend

Research direction

Read lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb around the charset construction near line 489, then reproduce the issue with the Net::HTTP request shown in the report. Verify the Content-Type charset formatting against RFC 7230 and confirm the request completes without the reported unknown-encoding error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

uri = URI('http://127.0.0.1:8080')
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.hostname, uri.port)
http.response_body_encoding = true
http.send_request('GET', uri.request_uri)

/opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/net-http-0.9.1/lib/net/http/response.rb:381:in 'String#force_encoding': unknown encoding name - "UTF-8" (ArgumentError)
    @body.force_encoding(enc) if enc
	from /opt/homebrew/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/net-http-0.9.1/lib/net/http/response.rb:381:in 'Net::HTTPResponse#read_body'

$ curl -I http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8"
Server: WEBrick/1.9.2 (Ruby/4.0.1/2026-01-13)

$ open https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6

[3.2.6](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-3.2.6). Field Value Components
quoted-string = DQUOTE *( qdtext / quoted-pair ) DQUOTE
A sender SHOULD NOT generate a quoted-pair in a quoted-string except where necessary

$ open https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml

irb> Encoding.list.flat_map { it.name.delete('0-9A-Za-z').chars }.tally.sort_by(&:first).to_h
=> {"-" => 86, "_" => 1}

$ git diff
diff --git a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
index 4e759d8..2de7785 100644
--- a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
+++ b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
@@ -489,3 +489,3 @@ module WEBrick
         else
-          type << "; charset=\"#{enc.name}\""
+          type << "; charset=#{enc.name}"
         end

http.send_request('GET', uri.request_uri)
# #<Net::HTTPOK 200 OK readbody=true>
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