523860 - Do not escape double quote character " to \" in iCalendar output (potential RFC 2445 violation)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Internal Components, defect)

Description

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

User-Agent:       Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; de) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5pre) Gecko/20091022 Calendar/1.0pre

Do not escape double quote character " to \" in iCalendar output (potential RFC 2445 violation)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create new event an enter the following description:
   Meeting to provide technical review for "Phoenix" design.
   Happy Face Conference Room. Phoenix design team MUST attend this meeting.
   RSVP to team leader.
2. Export event into the iCalendar format and check the output
Actual Results:  
Double quote character " has been escaped to \"

> DESCRIPTION:Meeting to provide technical review for \"Phoenix\" design.\nH
>  appy Face Conference Room. Phoenix design team MUST attend this meeting.\n
>  RSVP to team leader.

Expected Results:  
Double quote character " is not escaped as shown in the example of the Description property in RFC2445 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445#section-4.8.1.5>

>      DESCRIPTION:Meeting to provide technical review for "Phoenix"
>        design.\n Happy Face Conference Room. Phoenix design team
>        MUST attend this meeting.\n RSVP to team leader.

Comment 2

[Felix Möller]

I have discovered this issue today and before reporting it here, I thought it was a bug in my calendar server.

There is discussion about this in http://trac.calendarserver.org/ticket/419. Cyrus Daboo one of the involved people in RFC5545 commented there.

In my duplicate Bernard Desruisseaux the Editor of RFC5545 commented.


With the Apple Calendar Server this is a major problem as events which are not valid are rejected. And all events containing a " cannot be saved therefore.

Comment 3

[Felix Möller]

The Calendar Server has changed its VObject library to PyCalendar. But one again has to patch it to be usable with Lightning. It would be really great to have this fixed...

Comment 4

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Felix, do you think you could take a look at libical to find out where this happens? We could very well patch this, if we also send the patch upstream.

Comment 5

[Felix Möller]

I cannot test this at the moment and I am really not sure.

But the following might be a hint:
fm@thinkpad:~/libical/src/libical # svn info icalvalue.c | grep ^URL
URL: https://freeassociation.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/freeassociation/trunk/libical/src/libical/icalvalue.c
fm@thinkpad:~/libical/src/libical # svn diff
Index: icalvalue.c
===================================================================
--- icalvalue.c (Revision 1071)
+++ icalvalue.c (Arbeitskopie)
@@ -322,7 +322,6 @@
                 icalmemory_append_char(&str,&str_p,&buf_sz,*p);
                 break;
             }
-           case '"':
            case '\\': {
             icalmemory_append_char(&str,&str_p,&buf_sz,'\\');
             icalmemory_append_char(&str,&str_p,&buf_sz,*p);

Comment 6

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Attachment: Fix - v1

Looks good. This patch adds a unit test, if you can't get the tests to run please ignore that part. We should get this patch upstream too.

Comment 7

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Allen, could you push this patch upstream if you agree?

Comment 8

[Allen Winter]

Philipp,

We can take a look.  Would you mind putting the patch up on the freeassociation patch tracker at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=16077&atid=316077

Comment 9

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Filed at:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3382301&group_id=16077&atid=116077

thanks for consideration, I'm open to comments

Comment 10

[Matthew Mecca [:mmecca]]

Comment on attachment 549052 [details] [diff] [review]
Fix - v1

Looks good to me. r=mmecca

Comment 11

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Pushed to comm-central <http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/34ea6b1cf02c>

Comment 12

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Backported to comm-aurora <http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-aurora/rev/af0063799d09>

Comment 13

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Backported to comm-beta <http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/11c4cb2ed336>