635489 - Check whether a hostname is in a known TLD. Add function to nsIEffectiveTLDService

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1621168

(Core :: Networking, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I'd like to check whether a hostname ends in a known TLD. I don't want to do DNS lookups.
Possible usecases for that:
- More extensive checks on hostnames entered by the user, where apppropriate
- Guessing whether a given string is a hostname or freetext URL, e.g.
  - in the awesomebar
  - in the URL recognition in plaintext mails

We have nsIEffectiveTLDService (the origin of <http://www.publicsuffix.org>), but getBaseDomainFromHost("utter.non.sense") returns "non.sense". That makes it useless for my usecase.

I see no other function to check whether the TLD is in the list at all or not. Also, the list is unfortunately directly compiled in, so I can't even load and parse it myself.
<http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mozilla/netwerk/dns/nsIEffectiveTLDService.idl>

Comment 1

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 2

[Sonakshi Saxena]

(In reply to Ben Bucksch (:BenB) from comment #0)

I'd like to check whether a hostname ends in a known TLD. I don't want to do
DNS lookups.
Possible usecases for that:

• More extensive checks on hostnames entered by the user, where apppropriate
• Guessing whether a given string is a hostname or freetext URL, e.g.
  • in the awesomebar
  • in the URL recognition in plaintext mails

We have nsIEffectiveTLDService (the origin of
http://www.publicsuffix.org), but getBaseDomainFromHost("utter.non.sense")
returns "non.sense". That makes it useless for my usecase.

I see no other function to check whether the TLD is in the list at all or
not. Also, the list is unfortunately directly compiled in, so I can't even
load and parse it myself.
<http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mozilla/netwerk/dns/
nsIEffectiveTLDService.idl>

Hey!
Is this still active? If yes, then I'd love to work on this
Thanks :)

Comment 3

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

This doesn't block any bugs and I don't see a use for it. So, no, I don't think we need a patch here.

Ben?

Comment 4

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Hi Honza, I need this every time I want to verify a URL or hostname in more depth, without triggering network requests. For example, if you want to verify that an email address is valid, this is highly useful. It is also useful when detecting URLs in plain text, checking hostnames that the user entered in a form, and similar.

This appears in all kinds of cases: <input type="email">, <input type="url">, bug 19313, bug 32442, in the Thunderbird account creation wizard when checking the email address, client-only "single page app" web apps when trying to detect URLs in plain text. This comes up again and again for me.

You cannot imagine how many people misspell their own email address. I can see that in the server logs for my company, e.g. "michael@hotmail".

Comment 5

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

I wonder why this is then 9 years old and a P5.

Anyway, Ben, can you please propose the API how exactly it should it look like?
Thanks.

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

It seems that ACString getKnownPublicSuffixFromHost(in AUTF8String aHost); was added in bug 1621168 very recently (last month) for exactly this usecase here. What a coincidence! :-)

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Sonakshi Saxena, thank you for volunteering for this bug! There are plenty of other useful feature requests still waiting for your engagement. :-)