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@almetge almetge commented Jan 29, 2026

This fixes #5745

Motivation

The RFC7616 states the following for the Authorization header:
"For historical reasons, a sender MUST NOT generate the quoted string syntax for the following parameters: algorithm, qop, and nc."

The examples provided in the RFC also show that those parameters are unquoted.

Project history

I also found PR #1765 that intentionally quoted the qop parameter but I believe the RFC was misinterpreted:
RFC2617 defines the grammar for the Authorization header in chapter 3.2.2 as message-qop = "qop" "=" qop-value and the qop-value is defined in chapter 3.2.1 as qop-value = "auth" | "auth-int" | token.
Quotes in the grammar are used to indicate a raw string and should not be part of the final message.

The quoted part of the RFC in the linked PR is an extract from chapter 3.2.1 for the definition of qop-options which only affect the WWW-Authenticate header sent by the server, not the client-sent response in the Authorization header.

The RFC7616 states, for the Authorization header:
"For historical reasons, a sender MUST NOT generate the quoted string
syntax for the following parameters: algorithm, qop, and nc."
The examples provided in the RFC also show that those parameters are
unquoted.
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HTTPDigestAuth uses quotes for algorithm and qop tokens of the Digest header

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