PCRE2 doesn't match umlauts using "with diaeresis" and "combining diaeresis" - c++

I'm using pcre2 (build with unicode support) in a C++ program. I could successfully match umlauts including mixed upper-/lowercase:
auto s1 = "äöü";
auto s2 = "ÄÖÜ";
pcre2_compile(s1, PCRE2_ZERO_TERMINATED, PCRE2_CASELESS | PCRE2_UTF, ...);
pcre2_match(s2...); // match!
However different encodings of the same letter cause problems. Example:
auto s1 = "\xC3\x9C"; // U WITH DIAERESIS = Ü
auto s2 = "\x55\xCC\x88"; // U COMBINING DIAERESIS = Ü
are not recognized to be the same.
Example: MacOS reports umlauts in directory names using 3 bytes ("combining") while user input from a search mask comes using 2 bytes ("with"). No match. Is there a way to make pcre2 "see the equality" without doing some sort of normalization before? I hoped pcre2 would handle that internally.
Edit:
#Eljay: Thanks for your answer. I think you are technically right, but I guess a have to find an alternative. Normalizing the "needle" before searching is surely ok, but all the "haystacks" too? For short filenames this might be ok, but for crawling through gigabytes of text it seems too expensive. Idea #1: Since the software only needs to search in latin based text it looks manageable to use a "A-Z equivalence table" with pairs of "with XXX" and "combining XXX". I tried a few examples like "(?:Ü|Ü)" (first Ü encoded 2 bytes "U with..." and second Ü encoded 3 bytes "U combining..."). That works. Idea #2: Since the software is supposed to run on (current) versions of MacOS only, moving from PCRE/C++ to a bridged Swift function would kill the problem too. I checked a few examples - no special preparations needed: their regex-engine just matches, no matter which internal representation is used. Just the way I hoped pcre would do.

Related

Are these characters safe to use in HTML, Postgres, and Bash?

I have a project where I'm trying to enable other, possibly hostile, coders to label, in lowercase various properties that will be displayed in differing contexts, including embed in HTML, saved and manipulated in Postgres, used as attribute labels in JavaScript, and manipulated in the shell (say, saving a data file as продажи.zip) as well as various data analysis tools like graph-tool, etc.
I've worked on multilingual projects before, but they were either smaller customers that didn't need to especially worry about sophisticated attacks or they were projects that I came to after the multilingual aspect was in place, so I wasn't the one responsible for verifying security.
I'm pretty sure these should be safe, but I don't know if there are gotchas I need to look out for, like, say, a special [TAB] or [QUOTE] character in the Chinese character set that might escape my escaping.
Am I ok with these in my regex filter?
dash = '-'
english = 'a-z'
italian = ''
russain = 'а-я'
ukrainian = 'ґї'
german = 'äöüß'
spanish = 'ñ'
french = 'çéâêîôûàèùëï'
portuguese = 'ãõ'
polish = 'ąćęłńóśźż'
turkish = 'ğışç'
dutch = 'áíúýÿìò'
swedish = 'å'
danish = 'æø'
norwegian = ''
estonian = ''
romainian = 'șî'
greek = 'α-ωίϊΐόάέύϋΰήώ'
chinese = '([\p{Han}]+)'
japanese = '([\p{Hiragana}\p{Katakana}]+)'
korean = '([\p{Hangul}]+)'
If you restrict yourself to text encodings with a 7-bit ASCII compatible subset, you're reasonably safe treating anything above 0x7f (U+007f) as "safe" when interacting with most saneish programming languages and tools. If you use perl6 you're out of luck ;)
You should avoid supporting or take special care with input or output of text using the text encoding Shift-JIS, where the ¥ symbol is at 0x5c where \ would usually reside. This offers opportunities for nefarious trickery by exploiting encoding conversions.
Avoid or take extra care with other non-ascii-compatible encodings too. EBDIC is one, but you're unlikely to ever meet it in the wild. UTF-16 and UTF-32 obviously, but if you misprocess them the results are glaringly obvious.
Reading:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets
What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text
Personally I think your approach is backwards. You should define input and output functions to escape and unescape strings according to the lexical syntaxes of each target tool or language, rather than trying to prohibit any possible metacharacter. But then I don't know your situation, and maybe it's just impractical for what you're doing.
I'm not quite sure what your actual issue is. If you correctly convert your text to the target format, then you don't care what the text could possibly be. This will ensure both proper conversion AND security.
For instance:
If your text is to be included in HTML, it should be escaped using appropriate HTML quoting functions.
Example:
Wrong
// XXX DON'T DO THIS XXX
echo "<span>".$variable."</span>"
Right:
// Actual encoding function varies based your environment
echo "<span>".htmlspecialchars($variable)."</span>"
Yes, this will also handle properly the case of text containing & or <.
If your text is to be used in an SQL query, you should use parameterised queries.
Example:
Wrong
// XXX DON'T DO THIS XXX
perform_sql_query("SELECT this FROM that WHERE thing=".$variable")
Right
// Actual syntax and function will vary
perform_sql_query("SELECT this FROM that WHERE thing=?", [$variable]);
If you text is to be included in JSON, just use appropriate JSON-encoding functions.
Example:
Wrong
// XXX DON'T DO THIS XXX
echo '{"this":"'.$variable.'"}'
Right
// actual syntax and function may vary
echo json_encode({this: $variable});
The shell is a bit more tricky, and it's often a pain to deal with non-ASCII characters in many environments (e.g. FTP or doing an scp between different environments). So don't use explicit names for files, use identifiers (numeric id, uuid, hash...) and store the mapping to the actual name somewhere else (in a database).

Translate accented to unaccented characters in Sublime Text snippet using regex

I'm writing a ST3 snippet that inserts a \subsection{} with a label. The label is created by converting the header text to conform with the LaTeX standards for labels using a (rather lengthy) regular expression:
${1/(?:([ \t_]+)?|\b)(?:([ÅÄÆÁÀÃ])?|\b)(?:([åäæâàáã])?|\b)(?:([ÉÈÊË])?|\b)(?:([éèëê])?|\b)(?:([ÌÌÎÏ])?|\b)(?:([íìïî])?|\b)(?:([Ñ])?|\b)(?:([ñ])?|\b)(?:([ÖØÓÒÔÖÕ])?|\b)(?:([öøóòôõ])?|\b)(?:([ÜÛÚÙ])?|\b)(?:([üûúù])?|\b)/(?1:-)(?2:A)(?3:a)(?4:E)(?5:e)(?6:I)(?7:i)(?8:N)(?9:n)(?10O)(?11:o)(?12:U)(?13:u)/g}
Actually, I would like for it to be even longer. But if I add the extra groups that I would like, then ST3 crashes when I execute the snippet.
${1/(?:([ \t_]+)?|\b)(?:([ÅÄÆÁÀÃ])?|\b)(?:([åäæâàáã])?|\b)(?:([Ç])?|\b)(?:([ç])?|\b)(?:([ÉÈÊË])?|\b)(?:([éèëê])?|\b)(?:([ÌÌÎÏ])?|\b)(?:([íìïî])?|\b)(?:([Ñ])?|\b)(?:([ñ])?|\b)(?:([ÖØÓÒÔÖÕ])?|\b)(?:([öøóòôõ])?|\b)(?:([ÜÛÚÙ])?|\b)(?:([üûúù])?|\b)(?:([Ý])?|\b)(?:([ÿý])?|\b)/(?1:-)(?2:A)(?3:a)(?4:C)(?5:c)(?6:E)(?7:e)(?8:I)(?9:i)(?10:O)(?11:o)(?12:N)(?13:n)(?14:U)(?15:u)(?16:Y)(?17:y)/g}
Is there any more efficient way of doing this? Preferably one that won't cause ST3 to crash ;)
Edit:
Here are some example strings:
Flygande bæckasiner søka hwila på mjuka tuvor
Åke Staël hade en överflödig idé
And the results (with the current, working regex):
Flygande-backasiner-soka-hwila-pa-mjuka-tuvor
Ake-Stael-hade-en-overflodig-ide
But I would like to also replace the characters (ÇçÝÿý) with their unaccented counterparts (CcYyy) so that e.g.
Comment ça va
becomes
Comment-ca-va
I don't know this syntax, but I suspect that the problem comes from the too many optional groups combined with a lot of alternatives that cause a too complex processing.
So you can try to design your pattern like this, and you can add other groups of letters in the same way (take a look at the unicode table to find character ranges):
${1/([ \t_]+)|([À-Å])|([à-å])|([È-Ë])|([è-ë])|([Ì-Ï])|([ì-ï])|([Ò-ÖØ])|([ò-öø])|([Ù-Ü])|([ù-ü])|(Æ)|(æ)|(Œ)|(œ)|(Ñ)|(ñ)/(?1:-)(?2:A)(?3:a)(?4:E)(?5:e)(?6:I)(?7:i)(?8:O)(?9:o)(?10:U)(?11:u)(?12:AE)(?13:ae)(?14:OE)(?15:oe)(?16:N)(?17:n)/g}
if the lookahead feature is available you can improve this pattern to prevent non-accented characters to be tested with each alternatives:
${1/(?=[ \t_À-ÆÈ-ÏÑ-ÖØ-Üà-æè-ïñ-öø-üŒœ])(?:([ \t_]+)|([À-Å])|([à-å])|([È-Ë])|([è-ë])|([Ì-Ï])|([ì-ï])|([Ò-ÖØ])|([ò-öø])|([Ù-Ü])|([ù-ü])|(Æ)|(æ)|(Œ)|(œ)|(Ñ)|(ñ))/(?1:-)(?2:A)(?3:a)(?4:E)(?5:e)(?6:I)(?7:i)(?8:O)(?9:o)(?10:U)(?11:u)(?12:AE)(?13:ae)(?14:OE)(?15:oe)(?16:N)(?17:n)/g}
Note: Æ (Aelig) must be transliterated as AE (the same for Œ => OE)

Tokenizing japanese string and converting to hiragana

I am using string tokenizer and transform APIs to convert kanji characters to hiragana.
The code in query (What is the replacement for Language Analysis framework's Morpheme analysis deprecated APIs) converts most of kanji characters to hiragana but these APIs fails to convert kanji word having 3-4 characters.
like-
a) 現人神 is converted to latin - 'gen ren shen' and in hiragana- 'げんじんしん'
whereas it should be - in latin - 'Arahitogami ' and in hiragana- 'あらひとがみ'
b) 安本丹 is converted to latin - 'an ben dan' and in hiragana- 'やすもとまこと'
whereas it should be - in latin as - 'Yasumoto makoto ' and in hiragana- 'あんぽんたん'
My main purpose is to obtain the ruby text for given japanese text. I cant use lang analysis framework as its unavailable in 64-bit.
Any suggestions? Are there other APIs to perform such string conversion?
So in both cases your API uses onyomi but shouldn't. So I assume it just guesses "3 or more characters ? onyomi should be more appropriate in most cases, so I use it". Sounds like an actual dictionary is needed for your problem, which you can download.
Names ( for b) ) should still be a problem tho. I don't see how a computer should be able to get the correct name from kanjis, as even native japanese people sometimes fail at it. jisho.org doesn't even find a single name for 安本丹.
( Btw you mixed up your hiragana in b), and the latin for 'あんぽんたん'. I can't write comments yet with my rep so I'm leaving this here )

Range of UTF-8 Characters in C++11 Regex

This question is an extension of Do C++11 regular expressions work with UTF-8 strings?
#include <regex>
if (std::regex_match ("中", std::regex("中") )) // "\u4e2d" also works
std::cout << "matched\n";
The program is compiled on Mac Mountain Lion with clang++ with the following options:
clang++ -std=c++0x -stdlib=libc++
The code above works. This is a standard range regex "[一-龠々〆ヵヶ]" for matching any Japanese Kanji or Chinese character. It works in Javascript and Ruby, but I can't seem to get ranges working in C++11, even with using a similar version [\u4E00-\u9fa0]. The code below does not match the string.
if (std::regex_match ("中", std::regex("[一-龠々〆ヵヶ]")))
std::cout << "range matched\n";
Changing locale hasn't helped either. Any ideas?
EDIT
So I have found that all ranges work if you add a + to the end. In this case [一-龠々〆ヵヶ]+, but if you add {1} [一-龠々〆ヵヶ]{1} it does not work. Moreover, it seems to overreach it's boundaries. It won't match latin characters, but it will match は which is \u306f and ぁ which is \u3041. They both lie below \u4E00
nhahtdh also suggested regex_search which also works without adding + but it still runs into the same problem as above by pulling values outside of its range. Played with the locales a bit as well. Mark Ransom suggests it treats the UTF-8 string as a dumb set of bytes, I think this is possibly what it is doing.
Further pushing the theory that UTF-8 is getting jumbled some how, [a-z]{1} and [a-z]+ matches a, but only [一-龠々〆ヵヶ]+ matches any of the characters, not [一-龠々〆ヵヶ]{1}.
Encoded in UTF-8, the string "[一-龠々〆ヵヶ]" is equal to this one: "[\xe4\xb8\x80-\xe9\xbe\xa0\xe3\x80\x85\xe3\x80\x86\xe3\x83\xb5\xe3\x83\xb6]". And this is not the droid character class you are looking for.
The character class you are looking for is the one that includes:
any character in the range U+4E00..U+9FA0; or
any of the characters 々, 〆, ヵ, ヶ.
The character class you specified is the one that includes:
any of the "characters" \xe4 or \xb8; or
any "character" in the range \x80..\xe9; or
any of the "characters" \xbe, \xa0, \xe3, \x80, \x85, \xe3 (again), \x80 (again), \x86, \xe3 (again), \x83, \xb5, \xe3 (again), \x83 (again), \xb6.
Messy isn't it? Do you see the problem?
This will not match "latin" characters (which I assume you mean things like a-z) because in UTF-8 those all use a single byte below 0x80, and none of those is in that messy character class.
It will not match "中" either because "中" has three "characters", and your regex matches only one "character" out of that weird long list. Try assert(std::regex_match("中", std::regex("..."))) and you will see.
If you add a + it works because "中" has three of those "characters" in your weird long list, and now your regex matches one or more.
If you instead add {1} it does not match because we are back to matching three "characters" against one.
Incidentally "中" matches "中" because we are matching the three "characters" against the same three "characters" in the same order.
That the regex with + will actually match some undesired things because it does not care about order. Any character that can be made from that list of bytes in UTF-8 will match. It will match "\xe3\x81\x81" (ぁ U+3041) and it will even match invalid UTF-8 input like "\xe3\xe3\xe3\xe3".
The bigger problem is that you are using a regex library that does not even have level 1 support for Unicode, the bare minimum required. It munges bytes and there isn't much your precious tiny regex can do about it.
And the even bigger problem is that you are using a hardcoded set of characters to specify "any Japanese Kanji or Chinese character". Why not use the Unicode Script property for that?
R"(\p{Script=Han})"
Oh right, this won't work with C++11 regexes. For a moment there I almost forgot those are annoyingly worse than useless with Unicode.
So what should you do?
You could decode your input into a std::u32string and use char32_t all over for the matching. That would not give you this mess, but you would still be hardcoding ranges and exceptions when you mean "a set of characters that share a certain property".
I recommend you forget about C++11 regexes and use some regular expression library that has the bare minimum level 1 Unicode support, like the one in ICU.

Using preg_replace/ preg_match with UTF-8 characters - specifically Māori macrons

I'm writing some autosuggest functionality which suggests page names that relate to the terms entered in the search box on our website.
For example typing in "rubbish" would suggest "Rubbish & Recycling", "Rubbish Collection Centres" etc.
I am running into a problem that some of our page names include macrons - specifically the macron used to correctly spell "Māori" (the indigenous people of New Zealand).
Users are going to type "maori" into the search box and I want to be able to return pages such as "Māori History".
The autosuggestion is sourced from a cached array built from all the pages and keywords. To try and locate Māori I've been trying various regex expressions like:
preg_match('/\m(.{1})ori/i',$page_title)
Which also returns page titles containing "Moorings" but not "Māori". How does preg_match/ preg_replace see characters like "ā" and how should I construct the regex to pick them up?
Cheers
Tama
Use the /u modifier for utf-8 mode in regexes,
You're better of on a whole with doing an iconv('utf-8','ascii//TRANSLIT',$string) on both name & search and comparing those.
One thing you need to remember is that UTF-8 gives you multi-byte characters for anything outside of ASCII. I don't know if the string $page_title is being treated as a Unicode object or a dumb byte string. If it's the byte string option, you're going to have to do double dots there to catch it instead, or {1,4}. And even then you're going to have to verify the up to four bytes you grab between the M and the o form a singular valid UTF-8 character. This is all moot if PHP does unicode right, I haven't used it in years so I can't vouch for it.
The other issue to consider is that ā can be constructed in two ways; one as a single character (U+0101) and one as TWO unicode characters ('a' plus a combining diacritic in the U+0300 range). You're likely just only going to ever get the former, but be aware that the latter is also possible.
The only language I know of that does this stuff reliably well is Perl 6, which has all kinds on insane modifiers for internationalized text in regexps.