"Method gave invalid 400 URI Failure message" when running "apt-get update"

Question

When I use the command sudo apt-get update I get the error message Method gave invalid 400 URI Failure message. The odd thing is every time I use the command it crashes at a different spot.

For example:

$ sudo apt-get update
Ign http://dl.google.com stable InRelease                             
Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy InRelease                         
Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy InRelease                         
Hit http://dl.google.com stable Release.gpg                          
Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy-updates InRelease                
Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy InRelease                         
Hit http://dl.google.com stable Release                              
Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy InRelease                          
Hit http://dl.google.com stable/main amd64 Packages                  
Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy InRelease                         
Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy Release.gpg [316 B]             
Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com saucy-security InRelease               
Get:2 http://ppa.launchpad.net saucy Release.gpg [316 B]             
E: Method gave invalid 400 URI Failure message 

Here is the output of wget -d http://ppa.launchpad.net/ -o /tmp/outputfile.log:

$ wget -d http://ppa.launchpad.net/ -o /tmp/outputfile.logSetting --output-file (logfile) to /tmp/outputfile.log

DEBUG output created by Wget 1.14 on linux-gnu.

URI encoding = ‘UTF-8’
--2014-07-10 13:48:37--  http://ppa.launchpad.net/ Resolving ppa.launchpad.net (ppa.launchpad.net)... 91.189.95.83 Caching ppa.launchpad.net => 91.189.95.83 Connecting to ppa.launchpad.net (ppa.launchpad.net)|91.189.95.83|:80... connected. Created socket 4. Releasing 0x0000000000f3dde0 (new refcount 1).

---request begin--- GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Wget/1.14 (linux-gnu) Accept: */* Host: ppa.launchpad.net Connection: Keep-Alive

---request end--- HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
---response begin--- HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:48:40 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Vary: Accept-Encoding Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

---response end--- 200 OK Registered socket 4 for persistent reuse. URI content encoding = ‘UTF-8’ Length: unspecified [text/html] Saving to: ‘index.html’

     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 7.72K
    50K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 13.3K
   100K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 12.6K
  1850K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 19.2K
  1900K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 8.97K
  1950K .......... .......... .......... .......... ...       
18.2K=2m34s

2014-07-10 13:52:18 (12.9 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [2041092]

Here are my locale information:

$ locale
LANG=en
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_CA.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_CA.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_CA.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_CA.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_CA.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_CA.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.utf8"
LC_ALL=en_CA.utf8

Answer 1

Your locale encoding settings is utf8 instead of UTF-8.

try this command:

   sudo locale-gen en_CA.UTF-8

exit from terminal and re-login (I'm not sure if you have to reboot).

Check if locale settings are correctly modified and try perl and apt-get command.