slackware 12.2 kde firefox 3.5.6: please confirm bug

bokr · 01-01-2010, 11:38 PM

Hello, thought I'd try here first, since I am running
slackware, though it's a firefox problem ...

To verify bug, just go into a KDE konsole xterm, and do

[13:35 ~]$ mkdir ~/ffbug
[13:35 ~]$ touch ~/ffbug/_$'\031'_
[13:35 ~]$ firefox file://$(echo ~)/ffbug &

(This assumes you didn't already have a ~/ffbug directory,
and you have firefox 3.5.6 installed -- the prior firefox
did not have this problem)

What you will probably see is firefox trying to display
a listing of the ~/ffbug directory, but instead showing
an error message: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed.

I posted this in the mozillazine forum, where it got
read 20 times, but no response. Hoping for better luck
here, where there are more linux users ;-)

TIA

Sorry, maybe I disabled replies in my options ;-/
Hope I fixed it if so...

bonaire · 01-02-2010, 05:11 PM

I can confirm this but i would not say this is a real world problem. And it is not a problem of firefox directly. It is a Gecko or libxml or what ever problem because file name characters are not escaped correctly.

knudfl · 01-03-2010, 02:18 AM

.. And for good reasons the firefox for Slackware 12.2
is version 3.0.16 → mozilla-firefox-3.0.16-i686-1.tgz
ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.slac...ches/packages/
> > slackware/slackware-12.2/patches/packages/

Firefox-3.5.6 may work reasonably well in some other
older Linux's, but Slackware 12.2 : No.
.....

bokr · 01-03-2010, 04:12 PM

Thanks both for replying. I have firefox 3.5.6 for sure.
I have diagnosed the problem further. Please try this:
(Assuming konsole xterm in KDE, this is copied from what I did

[13:52 ~]$ mkdir ~/ffbug
[13:52 ~]$ cd ~/ffbug
[13:52 ~/ffbug]$ cat<<'EOF'>problem_title.html
> <html>
> <head>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
> <title>This title’s first apostrophe's encoding may a problem</title>
> </head>
> <body>
>
> <h1>This title’s first apostrophe's encoding may a problem</h1>
> That was encoded as<br>"This title&#8217;s first apostrophe's encoding may a problem"
>
> </body></html>
> EOF
[13:53 ~/ffbug]$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 bokr users 355 2010-01-03 13:53 problem_title.html
[13:54 ~/ffbug]$ # note final slash below. Now going to firefox and do a saveas into this directory
[13:55 ~/ffbug]$ firefox problem_title.html/ &
[2] 17581
[13:56 ~/ffbug]$
[2]- Done firefox problem_title.html/
[13:57 ~/ffbug]$ # note what we got:
[13:58 ~/ffbug]$ ls -ltr
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 bokr users 355 2010-01-03 13:53 problem_title.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 bokr users 355 2010-01-03 13:56 This\ title\031s\ first\ apostrophe's\ encoding\ may\ a\ problem.html
[13:58 ~/ffbug]$ # you see the \031, and if you go back to firefox and strip back the location to the directory
[13:59 ~/ffbug]$ # and try to display that, you will get the XML Parsing Error.
[14:00 ~/ffbug]$ # So I'd say this is a real world problem. Apparently the save-as feature doesn't recognize
[14:00 ~/ffbug]$ # the utf-8 encoding when it uses the title as a file name (which it will apparently do
[14:01 ~/ffbug]$ # if it finds nothing after the last slash of the URL to use as file name.
[14:02 ~/ffbug]$

I haven't put this on mozilla yet, but this makes reproducible locally what happened
to me with a site on the net that had ’ (&#8217

in its title. Note the second apostrophe
gets handled properly.

bokr · 01-03-2010, 04:23 PM

Code:

[14:02 ~/ffbug]$ cat problem_title.html
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>This title’s first apostrophe's encoding  may a problem</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>This title’s first apostrophe's encoding  may a problem</h1>
That was encoded as<br>"This title&amp;#8217;s first apostrophe's encoding  may a problem"

</body></html>

The above may be easier to use, if you just want to copy into an editor and
create problem_title.html that way, sorry ;-/

Ignore above, I'll try to attach the problem_title.html source ;-/

... Had to use .txt extension, so change it to .html for use. Ugh.

NB: Of course, don't ever do that kind of extension change without
first satisfying yourself that it's not malware ;-)

I'll make a new html file that has everything explained within,
so it will be easier for folks to test ... after dinner ;-)

bokr · 01-04-2010, 01:30 AM

Ok, I now have an html file called problematic_saveas.html, which
can be displayed in firefox 3.5.6 and which can be saved by its own
name (warns of overwrite if same directory), and can be displayed
such that the saveas file name becomes the internal title string,
which is utf-8 and contains a unicode #8217 apostrophe and an ordinary
one. The ordinary one doesn't cause a problem, but the #8217 does,
because it gets transformed to a \031 character in the file name.

This in itself would be a legal unix file name, I believe, but some
apps don't even like spaces in file names, so it's not surprising
that it might cause a problem for some. The problem is that ff 3.5.6
has with its last revision lost the ability to display a directory
listing of a directory containing such a file. That is plainly bad.

Anyway, please have a look at the html to satisfy yourself that it's
not malware, and then try the things suggested therein, and post
your experience. If you are not running 3.5.6, it would still be
interesting to see if the \031 file name character is generated,
because in my case that happened. The directory display problem
happened to me because of internet web pages saved with older versions,
but I didn't notice, since I could browse the directories ok then.

I'll try to attach the html, but for my shorter previous file, the
upload filter didn't like the html, so I had to make it .txt.
I will append .txt and if so, you can snip it off after you check
the contents.

TIA.