diff --git a/lib/_http_client.js b/lib/_http_client.js
index c07589e9c5da6f..26590b9aec2e23 100644
--- a/lib/_http_client.js
+++ b/lib/_http_client.js
@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ function ClientRequest(options, cb) {
   if (self.agent && self.agent.protocol)
     expectedProtocol = self.agent.protocol;
 
-  if (options.path && / /.test(options.path)) {
+  if (options.path && /[\u0000-\u0020]/.test(options.path)) {
     // The actual regex is more like /[^A-Za-z0-9\-._~!$&'()*+,;=/:@]/
     // with an additional rule for ignoring percentage-escaped characters
     // but that's a) hard to capture in a regular expression that performs
diff --git a/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js b/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
index e01df255a8042c..2411d0e6be31e2 100644
--- a/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
+++ b/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
@@ -1,9 +1,14 @@
 'use strict';
-var common = require('../common');
-var assert = require('assert');
-var http = require('http');
+const common = require('../common');
+const assert = require('assert');
+const http = require('http');
 
-assert.throws(function() {
-  // Path with spaces in it should throw.
-  http.get({ path: 'bad path' }, common.fail);
-}, /contains unescaped characters/);
+function* bad() {
+  for (let i = 0; i <= 32; i += 1)
+    yield 'bad' + String.fromCharCode(i) + 'path';
+}
+
+for (const path of bad()) {
+  assert.throws(() => http.get({ path }, common.fail),
+                /contains unescaped characters/);
+}