RescueTime Linux Uploader

single quotes in titles are not escaped in YAML

Bug #369022 reported by L. Doherty on 2009-04-29

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	RescueTime Linux Uploader	Fix Released	High	Piotr Kilczuk

Bug Description

about 1/3 of my uploads fail because there is an entry in the upload file in which the window_title contains a single quote (which is not escaped - obviously the server fails to parse.) I tested it against the parser at http://yaml.org/cgi-bin/ypaste.pl to confirm.

Sorry about no patch - I may be able to help out in the future but at the moment both Linux and Python are new to me.

Matt Winkelmann (matthias-winkelmann+launchpad) on 2009-06-10

Changed in rescuetime-linux-uploader:
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Matt Winkelmann (matthias-winkelmann+launchpad) wrote on 2009-06-10:

small patch to escape single quotes Edit (284 bytes, text/plain)

There's a patch attached that solves this by escaping single quotes. There are other characters, especially in website titles, that lead to apparently malformed yaml, such as the “ in this page's title. As far as I understand, yaml should work with all unicode characters, therefore the problem might actually be on the server side. A quick fix would be to basically whitelist a standard range of characters (a-Z0-9,[]()!@#$$ etc.) and remove everything else via regex. Using an existing, tested yaml library might be even better.

Anyway, please try the patch attached. I suspect single quotes were responsible for a majority of these failed uploads.

Instructions: save patch in RescueTimeUploader, then patch -o uploader.py uploader.py quotes.diff
Install per README.

Please report back on any changes. Note that old files in /failed will not be corrected.

Revision history for this message

nrafal (rafal-nrafal) wrote on 2009-08-10:

Removing single quotes Edit (316 bytes, text/x-diff)

For me it didn't help - still got YAML errors when there's a single quote in app name. So I came up with simple solution - remove all single quotes ;)
It helped, and now everything seems to be ok. For everyone who doesn't care about presence of single quotes, I'm putting modified patch.

Revision history for this message

Codegram (info-codegram) wrote on 2009-09-21:

YAML and firefox 3.5 patch Edit (10.1 KiB, text/plain)

I've fixed these issues:

1.- YAML output. Now it outputs tag: "value" instead of tag: 'value', so that escaped 's won't cause a problem.
2.- Firefox extension. Now it supports being installed in firefox 3.5 and above.
3.- Added support for firefox 3.5 (shiretoko) so that it has its own .mozilla/firefox-3.5/currentURL file.

Revision history for this message

Akintayo (akintayo) wrote on 2009-11-02:

@Codegram
The double quotes fix doesn't work when there are double quotes in the title. E.g. (Bug #369022 in RescueTime Linux Uploader: “single quotes in titles are not escaped in YAML” - Mozilla Firefox), would fail.

Piotr Kilczuk (p-kilczuk) on 2010-01-20

Changed in rescuetime-linux-uploader:
importance:	Undecided → Medium
importance:	Medium → High
assignee:	nobody → Piotr Kilczuk (p-kilczuk)