KRL extended quoting - krl

There are two ways to do extended quoting in KRL. One of them is documented under Literals on Kynetx Docs. That looks like this:
var = <<
Some text
>>;
That syntax allows you to embed beestings (e.g., #{var}) in the text.
However, I've also seen another syntax used, with <| ... |> instead. What is the difference between these two types of extended quoting mechanisms? What are the limitations/advantages of each?

<<>> extended quotes are used for text and html.
<| |> extended quotes are used for javascript. Using these quotes when emitting javascript allows for the engine to process it as javascript, which not only parses faster, but also has different handling for newlines.
emit should always be used with <| |>.
Fun Fact: We call these clownhats. :)

Related

Handling single-character strings - in a function or in its caller? ssr()

What is the common way to work with strings in q, in a way, who is responsible for handling a single-character string: function itself or a user who runs it?
Ex:
$ q
KDB+ 3.6 2019.04.02 Copyright (C) 1993-2019 Kx Systems
m32
q)ssr["bar";"r";"z"] /looks good at a first glance
"baz"
q)ssr["bar";"?";"z"] /but wait, nothing happens here
"bar"
q)ssr["bar";(),"?";"z"] /convert 1-char to list: ok
"zzz"
See the difference in sending a single letter (r) vs question mark (?). Just sending a single character ? itself didn't do anything useful.
Is it a feature of ssr? And what is the general case for single-char sending/receiving - who should be responsible in most situations for dealing with atoms vs lists?
Upd:
Thanks to #terrylynch for pointing out this feature of ss/ssr:
q)ssr["bar?";"?";"z"]
"barz"
It's a feature of ss which in turn makes it a feature of ssr since ssr uses ss. See "supports some of the pattern-matching capabilities of like" comment: https://code.kx.com/q/ref/ss/
It looks like it has a check for the lookup char/string of special (regex-related) characters - if it's a single char just treat it like a char, if it's a string type treat it as a regex pattern.

.tmlanguage escape sequences and rule priorities

I'm implementing a syntax highlighter in Apple's Swift language by parsing .tmlanguage files and applying styles to a NSMutableAttributtedString.
I'm testing with javascript code, a javascript.tmlanguage file, and the monokai.tmtheme theme (both last included in sublime text 3) to check that the syntax get highlighted correctly. By applying each rule (patterns) in the .tmlanguage file in the same order they come, the syntax is almost perfectly highlighted.
The problem I'm having right now is that I don't know how to know that a quote (") should be escaped when it has a backslash before it (\"). Am I missing something in the .tmlanguage file that specifies that?. Other problem is that I have no idea how to know that other rules should be ignored when inside others, for example:
I'm getting double slashes taken as comments when inside strings: "http://stackoverflow.com/" a url is recognised as comment after //
Also double or single quotes are taken as strings when inside comments: // press "Enter" to continue, the word "Enter" gets highlighted as string when should be same color as comments
So, I don't know if there is some priority for some rules over others in the convention, or if there is something in the files that I haven't noticed.
Help please!
Update:
Here is a better example of what I meant by escape quotes:
I'm getting this: while all the letters should be yellow except for the escaped sequence (/") which should be blue.
The question is. How do I know that /" should be escaped? The rule for that piece of code is:
Maybe I am late to answer this. You can apply the following method.
(Ugly) In your end regex, use ([^/])(") and in your endCaptures, it would be
1 = string.quote.double.js
2 = punctuation.definition.string.end.js
If the string must be single line, you can use match=(")(.*)("), captures=
1 = punctuation.definition.string.begin.js
2 = string.quote.double.js
3 = punctuation.definition.string.end.js
and use your patterns
You can try applyEndPatternLast and see if it is allowed. Set applyEndPatternLast=1 will do.
The priority is that earlier rules in the file are prioritized over later rules. As an example, in my Python Improved language definition, I have a scope that contains a series of all-caps constants used in Django, a popular Python web framework. I also have a generic constant.other.allcaps.python scope that recognizes (just about) anything in all caps. Since the Django constants rule is before the allcaps rule in the .tmLanguage file, I can color it with a theme using one color, while the later-occurring "highlight everything in all caps" only grabs identifiers that are NOT part of the first list.
Because of this, you should put your "comments" scope(s) as early in the file as possible, then write your parser in such a way that it obeys the rule I described above. However, it's slightly more complicated than that, as I believe items in the repository are prioritized based on where their include line is, not where the repository rule is defined in the file. You may want to do some testing to verify that, though.
Unfortunately I'm not sure what you mean about the escaped quotes - could you expand on that, and maybe add an example or two?
Hope this helps.
Assuming that / is the correct character for escaping a double quote mark, the following should work:
"str_double_quote": {
"begin": "\"",
"end": "\"",
"name": "string.quoted.double.swift",
"patterns": [
{
"name": "constant.character.escape.swift",
"match": "/[\"/]"
}
]
}
You can match an escaped double quote mark (/") and a literal forward slash (//) in the patterns to consume them before the end marker is used to handle them.
If the character for escaping is actually a backslash, then the tricky bit is that there are two levels of escaping, for the JSON encoding as well as the regular expression syntax. To match \", the regular expression requires you to escape the backslash (\\"). JSON requires you to escape backslashes and double quotes, resulting in \\\\\" in a TextMate JSON grammar file. The match expression would thus be \\\\[\"\\\\].

Regular expression to prevent SQL injection

I know I have to escape single quotes, but I was just wondering if there's any other character, or text string I should guard against
I'm working with mysql and h2 database...
If you check the MySQL function mysql-real-escape-string which is used by all upper level languages you'll see that the strange characters list is quite huge:
\
'
"
NUL (ASCII 0)
\n
\r
Control+Z
The upper language wrappers like the PHP one may also protect the strings from malformed unicode characters which may end up as a quote.
The conclusion is: do not escape strings, especially with hard-to-debug hard-to-read, hard-to-understand regular expressions. Use the built-in provided functions or use parameterized SQL queries (where all parameters cannot contain anything interpredted as SQL by the engine). This is also stated in h2 documentation: h2 db sql injection protection.
A simple solution for the problem above is to use a prepared statement:
This will somewhat depend on what type of information you need to obtain from the user. If you are only looking for simple text, then you might as well ignore all special characters that a user might input (if it's not too much trouble)--why allow the user to input characters that don't make sense in your query?
Some languages have functions that will take care of this for you. For example, PHP has the mysql_real_escape_string() function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php).
You are correct that single quotes (') are user input no-no's; but double quotes (") and backslashes (\) should also definitely be ignored (see the above link for which characters the PHP function ignores, since those are the most important and basic ones).
Hope this is at least a good start!

Can actions in Lex access individual regex groups?

Can actions in Lex access individual regex groups?
(NOTE: I'm guessing not, since the group characters - parentheses - are according to the documentation used to change precedence. But if so, do you recommend an alternative C/C++ scanner generator that can do this? I'm not really hot on writing my own lexical analyzer.)
Example:
Let's say I have this input: foo [tagName attribute="value"] bar and I want to extract the tag using Lex/Flex. I could certainly write this rule:
\[[a-z]+[[:space:]]+[a-z]+=\"[a-z]+\"\] printf("matched %s", yytext);
But let's say I would want to access certain parts of the string, e.g. the attribute but without having to parse yytext again (as the string has already been scanned it doesn't really make sense to scan part of it again). So something like this would be preferable (regex groups):
\[[a-z]+[[:space:]]+[a-z]+=\"([a-z]+)\"\] printf("matched attribute %s", $1);
You can separate it to start conditions. Something like this:
%x VALUEPARSE ENDSTATE
%%
char string_buf[100];
<INITIAL>\[[a-z]+[[:space:]]+[a-z]+=\" {BEGIN(VALUEPARSE);}
<VALUEPARSE>([a-z]+) (strncpy(string_buf, yytext, yyleng);BEGIN(ENDSTATE);} //getting value text
<ENDSTATE>\"\] {BEGIN(INITIAL);}
%%
About an alternative C/C++ scanner generator - I use QT class QRegularExpression for same things, it can very easy get regex group after match.
Certainly at least some forms of them do.
But the default lex/flex downloadable from sourceforge.org do not seem to list it in their documentation, and this example leaves the full string in yytext.
From IBM's LEX documentation for AIX:
(Expression)
Matches the expression in the parentheses.
The () (parentheses) operator is used for grouping and causes the expression within parentheses to be read into the yytext array. A group in parentheses can be used in place of any single character in any other pattern.
Example: (ab|cd+)?(ef)* matches such strings as abefef, efefef, cdef, or cddd; but not abc, abcd, or abcdef.

How do I protect against cross-site scripting?

I am using php, mysql with smarty and I places where users can put comments and etc. I've already escaped characters before inserting into database for SQL Injection. What else do I need to do?
XSS is mostly about the HTML-escaping(*). Any time you take a string of plain text and put it into an HTML page, whether that text is from the database, directly from user input, from a file, or from somewhere else entirely, you need to escape it.
The minimal HTML escape is to convert all the & symbols to & and all the < symbols to <. When you're putting something into an attribute value you would also need to escape the quote character being used to delimit the attribute, usually " to ". It does no harm to always escape both quotes (" and the single quote apostrophe '), and some people also escape > to >, though this is only necessary for one corner case in XHTML.
Any good web-oriented language should provide a function to do this for you. For example in PHP it's htmlspecialchars():
<p> Hello, <?php htmlspecialchars($name); ?>! </p>
and in Smarty templates it's the escape modifier:
<p> Hello, {$name|escape:'html'}! </p>
really since HTML-escaping is what you want 95% of the time (it's relatively rare to want to allow raw HTML markup to be included), this should have been the default. Newer templating languages have learned that making HTML-escaping opt-in is a huge mistake that causes endless XSS holes, so HTML-escape by default.
You can make Smarty behave like this by changing the default modifiers to html. (Don't use htmlall as they suggest there unless you really know what you're doing, or it'll likely screw up all your non-ASCII characters.)
Whatever you do, don't fall into the common PHP mistake of HTML-escaping or “sanitising” for HTML on the input, before it gets processed or put in the database. This is the wrong place to be performing an output-stage encoding and will give you all sort of problems. If you want to validate your input to make sure it's what the particular application expects, then fine, but weeding out or escaping “special” characters at this stage is inappropriate.
*: Other aspects of XSS are present when (a) you actually want to allow users to post HTML, in which case you have to whittle it down to acceptable elements and attributes, which is a complicated process usually done by a library like HTML Purifier, and even then there have been holes. Alternative, simpler markup schemes may help. And (b) when you allow users to upload files, which is something very difficult to make secure.
In regards to SQL Injection, escaping is not enough - you should use data access libraries where possible and parameterized queries.
For XSS (cross site scripting), start with html encoding outputted data. Again, anti XSS libraries are your friend.
One current approach is to only allow a very limited number of tags in and sanitize those in the process (whitelist + cleanup).
You'll want to make sure people can't post JavaScript code or scary HTML in their comments. I suggest you disallow anything but very basic markup.
If comments are not supposed to contain any markup, doing a
echo htmlspecialchars($commentText);
should suffice, but it's very crude. Better would be to sanitize all input before even putting it in your database. The PHP strip_tags() function could get you started.
If you want to allow HTML comments, but be safe, you could give HTML Purifier a go.
You should not modify data that is entered by the user before putting it into the database. The modification should take place as you're outputting it to the website. You don't want to lose the original data.
As you're spitting it out to the website, you want to escape the special characters into HTML codes using something like htmlspecialchars("my output & stuff", ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') -- make sure to specify the charset you are using. This string will be translated into my output & stuff for the browser to read.
The best way to prevent SQL injection is simply not to use dynamic SQL that accepts user input. Instead, pass the input in as parameters; that way it will be strongly typed and can't inject code.