java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid character found in the request target. The valid characters are defined in RFC 7230 and RFC 3986

If tomcat throws below exception:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid character found in the request target. The valid characters are defined in RFC 7230 and RFC 3986

 

 Check below point….

Are you using tomcat 8 ? 

Because there is | and ‘{‘, ‘}’ character or some other character which is not supported by Tomcat 8. And it may through below exception.

Tomcat - User - Tomcat 8.0.39 and tomcat 8.5.8 fails handling request

Tomcat has increased the validation of incoming HTTP requests to reject the requests that are not specification compliant. 

For the query string or parameters, the RFC specific extracts from RFC 3986 are:

unreserved    = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"

query       = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )

sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")" / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="

pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"

Hence, '{' and '}' are rejected.

Note:

In my request, I am sending a filter JSON object to the server which includes ‘{‘and ‘}’ and is getting rejected.

Request:

 http://localhost:8080/App/eqp?filters={"filters":{ "column":"xxx","operator":"LIKE","value":"111”}

But If you uses Tomcat Version 7, its working fine!!!