230310 - xmlhttpRequest sending a URL with a parameter containing a latin character (ñ,á,é,í,ó,ú) crashes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: XML, defect)

Description

[Juan Carlos Obregón]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0

See the steps to reproduce section and you can understand me.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.httpObj = new XMLHttpRequest()
2.httpObj.open("GET", "http://www....?xml=<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-
8859-1'?><REQUEST><CT id='CODUSER'><VL><![CDATA[ραινσϊ]]></VL></CT></REQUEST>", 
false);
3.httpObj.send (null)

Actual Results:  
Violation memory access in Windows; in Linux Mozilla locks

Expected Results:  
send the request to the host, where is a servlet to process it.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Not related to load/save.  Also not a mozilla development blocker.

If you can attach a small file to this bug using
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?bugid=230310&action=enter that would
be helpful -- pasting non-ascii text into bugzilla comments generally mucks with
encodings....

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

You're not supposed to send raw 8bit octets in http get request. That doesn't
mean that Mozilla should crash, but you have to know what you're doing is not
what nsIXMLHttpRequest supports. See the spec. of open method at 

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/extensions/xmlextras/base/public/nsIXMLHttpRequest.idl#187

Another parameter for charset may have to be added to open and openRequest of
nsIXMLHttpRequest. Alternatively, new methods with charset parameter may have to
 be added . Especially for 'POST' method (that has 'the' mechanism to specify
the charset), we have to. 

Having said that,  I hardly understand why some people want to use legacy
charsets __even__ in XML instead of just using the default UTF-8. 
As for UTF-16, it is not suitable for MIME (although it might be possible (bug
224820). 

Comment 3

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

the |string| IDL type does not support non-ascii characters (they msb will be
cleared by xpconnect). I'm also not sure what charset that ends up as, I guess
you'll end up with the lowest 7 bits of the utf16 value.

Comment 4

[Jungshik Shin]

Raw 8bit characters are  zero-padded when crossing xpcom boundary as 'string'. 

 Anyway, I didn't mean that we have to allow passing raw 8bit octets (di d I
have to say that? ;-)) What I meant is passing  'escaped' (in case of GET) and
mime-encoded characters (in case of POST). In both cases, we have to offer a way
to specify the charset.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Attachment: Attempted testcase

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

With that testcase I see no lockup or crash on Linux.

Comment 7

[Met - Martin Hassman]

Mozilla 1.5 crashed on the Windows2000 with the
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=138778&action=view

Incident ID: TB25070743X

Comment 8

[Wladimir Palant]

WFM - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 10

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

probably fixed by bug 232493. marking so, but please reopen if you're still
seeing this.