1777920 - Google CardDAV: additional backslash in text fields with colon

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect, P2)

Description

[Andreas]

Attachment: Google CardDAV_backslash.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.66 Safari/537.36 Edg/103.0.1264.44

Steps to reproduce:

Add a text with a colon : to any text field (contact name, notes,...) for a contact in a Google CardDAV address book.

Actual results:

When the contact is synced with Google, it adds an additional backslash before the colon.

Expected results:

Remove the backslash.

This bug should be related to bug 1772677

Comment 1

[Christian Riechers]

TB103.0b2 on Linux.
I can confirm the problem as described above.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Already fixed :-)

Comment 3

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Pretty sure it's not fixed for all fields.

Comment 4

[Andreas]

This is not fixed at all. Bug 1772677 only handles the URL field.
Since there was already a patch for this specific issue, I didn't want to broaden the scope of the original bug but filed a new one instead for the other fields.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Iiuc, Geoff says that it's Google who broke this by doing extra escaping which then sails through to us.
The outcome must be quite frustrating for users of Thunderbird who may find lots of extra slashes / in their text fields - I think that might qualify for P2.
Also note that multiline fields are suspected to be affected by this, too (bug 1777543).

Comment 6

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

I am looking at how best to mitigate this. It's not as easy as just taking out the characters, because we don't want to take them out if they're intentional, so we need to decide somehow (probably by checking if the card came from Google). Finding the right place in the code is complicated too.

Comment 8

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Attachment: Bug 1777920 - Fix bad escaping of vCards by Google's CardDAV server. r=mkmelin

Removes the extra escaping added to \r and : characters by Google server.

The removal happens as a card is read from the database, so no changes are permanent (unless the card is edited, in which case Google will put the escaping back again) and existing cards don't need fixing.
Because it's done at this point, none of the UI needs to be aware of it.

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/3fc99a8e3246
Fix bad escaping of vCards by Google's CardDAV server. r=mkmelin

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/1db0a1d856b2
follow-up - Fix a broken test. rs=bustage-fix DONTBUILD

Comment 11

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Comment on attachment 9285276 [details]
Bug 1777920 - Fix bad escaping of vCards by Google's CardDAV server. r=mkmelin

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #):
User impact if declined: Google contacts have unexpected characters in some fields
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): In 104 b1
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): Low

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9285276 [details]
Bug 1777920 - Fix bad escaping of vCards by Google's CardDAV server. r=mkmelin

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr102

Comment 13

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

This will need an esr 102 patch - the "lazy" javascript stuff isn't on 102.

Comment 14

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Attachment: 1777920-esr102.diff (includes follow-up)

Comment 15

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 102.1.1:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr102/rev/a4f2f6ce9073