439711 - btoa function doesn't encode unicode characters

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 213047

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

When btoa is passed a string containing unicode such as "→", which is used in the example, it produces the error "String contains an invalid character". It should not do this as it outputs utf-8 base64 strings. It should behave mostly like the non-native implementation I have in the example. This is very important to work when someone is using btoa to base64 encode user-input which can result in lost data.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Pass btoa some unicode characters.
Actual Results:  
I get the "String contains an invalid character" error.

Expected Results:  
I get the base64 encoded equivalent of the string.

Comment 1

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

Attachment: HTML testcase of btoa bug

HTML testcase

Comment 2

[Brian Crowder]

This could actually be a bug in NSPR, if it is legit.  Moved to DOM for now, though.

Comment 3

[karl]

Easily recreated. I'd like to flag this bug as "important" as btoa is useless for encoding user input. I've had to fall back to using encodeURIComponent instead.

Comment 4

[Chuck Baker]

This bug should be either fixed now or the btoa/atob functions be removed from the codebase until it can be fixed.  I am using these functions as part of encryption scheme in an extension I released.  I was unaware of the problem until I started to receive negative feedback. 

A function that works only part of the time is worse than one that doesn't work at all.

Comment 5

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

Attachment: improved testcase

Added a new testcase that also gives the error and output of btoa in an alert message and tells if btoa worked.

Comment 6

[Eli Grey (:sephr)]

Moved to major for reason of comment #3 and removed url that I didn't really need to have there.

Comment 7

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This looks like a duplicate of bug 213047