NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra · error · ElasticException

Error parsing URL:

Error message

Error parsing URL: 

What it means

URISyntaxException handler inside executeBulk. executeBulk builds its URL from the raw hostURL (NOT the repo-scoped httpURLbase) plus the path, with Content-Type application/x-ndjson. This fires when hostURL + path is not a valid URI.

Source

Thrown at Ghidra/Features/BSim/src/main/java/ghidra/features/bsim/query/elastic/ElasticConnection.java:374

		HttpURLConnection connection = null;
		try {
			URL httpURL = new URI(hostURL + path).toURL();
			connection = (HttpURLConnection) httpURL.openConnection();
			connection.setRequestMethod(POST);
			connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-ndjson");
			connection.setDoOutput(true);
			try (Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream())) {
				writer.write(body);
			}
			lastResponseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
			JsonObject resp = grabResponse(connection);
			if (!lastRequestSuccessful()) {
				throw new ElasticException(parseErrorJSON(resp));
			}
			return resp;
		}
		catch (URISyntaxException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error parsing URL: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		catch (IOException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error sending request: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		catch (JsonParseException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error parsing response: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		finally {
			if (connection != null) {
				connection.disconnect();
			}
		}
	}

	public JsonObject executeURIOnly(String command, String path) throws ElasticException {
		HttpURLConnection connection = null;
		try {
			URL httpURL = new URI(httpURLbase + path).toURL();

View on GitHub (pinned to d5f144c24d)

Solutions

1. Keep hostURL as scheme://host:port with no trailing slash and pass a literal, well-known bulk path.
2. Percent-encode any dynamic part of the bulk path with URLEncoder.encode(seg, UTF_8).
3. Pre-validate with URI.create(hostURL + path) to surface the exact bad character.

Example fix

// before
c.executeBulk("_bulk?refresh=true " + userTag, ndjson);
// after
c.executeBulk("_bulk?refresh=" + URLEncoder.encode(userTag, UTF_8), ndjson);

public static String safeBulkPath(String hostUrl, String path) {
    String base = hostUrl.replaceAll("/+$", "");
    URI.create(base); // validate host URL
    URI.create(base + "/" + path); // validate full bulk URL
    return path;
}

try {
    return conn.executeBulk(path, ndjson);
} catch (ElasticException e) {
    if (e.getMessage().startsWith("Error parsing URL"))
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid bulk path: " + path, e);
    throw e;
}

When it happens

Trigger: Bulk path argument (typically '_bulk' or a prefixed variant) containing a space or symbol; hostURL with a space, non-ASCII host, or trailing slash producing '//'; unencoded dynamic segment in the bulk path.

Common situations: Constructing the bulk path from user/derived input without encoding; copy-pasted ES URL with whitespace; mixed http/https scheme typo.

Related errors

• Invalid in URL
• Cannot have signature setting of 0
• drop database name must match
• Too many {type} specified (limit={MAX_TAG_COUNT}): {list.siz
• URL path must indicate the repository only

AI-assisted analysis of NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra@d5f144c24d (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/175c2df4a95cb721. Report an issue: GitHub.