271045 - Thunderbird rejects valid atom feeds

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

Description

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

The regular expressions used in determining the type of feed that Thunderbird
can possibly reject valid atom feeds (and also possibly RSS feeds).

In particular, in mozilla/mail/extensions/newsblog/content/Feed.js, starting on
line 188 uses regular expressions of the form: this.responseText.search(/="

The problem with this regular expression is that both apostrophes (') and quotes
(") can be used to denote attribute values in XML, so in the feed: <feed
xmlns='http://purl.org/atom/ns#'> the regular expression fails.

The easy fix for this would be to make the regular expressions use |["']| in
place of |"|, which would accept and parse all valid atom and RSS feeds (note
that the quotation mark at the end of the value can also be |'| or |"|. 

I think a more robust fix would be to inspect the DOM of the incoming feed and
check to see if the first element is <feed> or <rss>. This would allow
not-quite-valid (since atom seems to require a namespace) feeds to be parsed
correctly; however, I'm not very familiar with this code, so I'm not certain of
the feasibility of this approach.

Comment 1

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

Attachment: patch v1

Taking since I've now made a patch. This seems to work for me (but I hacked my
Thunderbird .9, so this is technically an untested patch, since I had to pull a
new copy of the file).

Comment 2

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

Comment on attachment 167402 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

Looking for r=. Does this need sr=? If not, once it has r=, can it just be
checked in?

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

this is a very low risk fix with clear verification steps agains the livejournal
test feeds.

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

fixed trunk and branch

Comment 5

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

Verified with Windows build 2004-12-03-06-0.9

the feed is added as expected