diff --git a/lib/_http_client.js b/lib/_http_client.js
index aef05eb8fa2299..644c0bb8c89e70 100644
--- a/lib/_http_client.js
+++ b/lib/_http_client.js
@@ -41,13 +41,16 @@ function ClientRequest(options, cb) {
   if (self.agent && self.agent.protocol)
     expectedProtocol = self.agent.protocol;
 
-  if (options.path && / /.test(options.path)) {
+  if (options.path && ! /^[\x00-\x08\x0E-\x1F\x21-\x7F]*$/.test(options.path)) {
     // The actual regex is more like /[^A-Za-z0-9\-._~!$&'()*+,;=/:@]/
     // with an additional rule for ignoring percentage-escaped characters
     // but that's a) hard to capture in a regular expression that performs
-    // well, and b) possibly too restrictive for real-world usage. That's
-    // why it only scans for spaces because those are guaranteed to create
-    // an invalid request.
+    // well, and b) possibly too restrictive for real-world usage.
+    //
+    // This regex rejects paths with whitespace (U+0009, U+000A, U+000B,
+    // U+000C, U+000D and U+0020) as those can have special meaning in the HTTP
+    // protocol, as well as paths with non-ASCII characters, (to deprecate
+    // previous buggy behaviour).
     throw new TypeError('Request path contains unescaped characters.');
   } else if (protocol !== expectedProtocol) {
     throw new Error('Protocol "' + protocol + '" not supported. ' +
diff --git a/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js b/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
index 1536916ae9b49c..3fe5db402cf8f7 100644
--- a/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
+++ b/test/parallel/test-http-client-unescaped-path.js
@@ -3,7 +3,18 @@ var common = require('../common');
 var assert = require('assert');
 var http = require('http');
 
-assert.throws(function() {
-  // Path with spaces in it should throw.
-  http.get({ path: 'bad path' }, assert.fail);
-}, /contains unescaped characters/);
+for (var path of ['bad path', 'line\nfeed', 'carriage\rreturn', 'tab\t']) {
+  assert.throws(
+    function() { http.get({ path: path }, assert.fail); },
+    /contains unescaped characters/,
+    'Path "' + path + '" with whitespace should throw'
+  );
+}
+
+for (var path of ['caf\u00e9', '\u0649\u0644\u0649', '💩' /* U+1F4A9 */ ]) {
+  assert.throws(
+    function() { http.get({ path: path }, assert.fail); },
+    /contains unescaped characters/,
+    'Path "' + path + '" with non-ASCII characters should throw'
+  );
+}