3 ms·

This exact mindset is why so much software is irreparably broken and riddled with CVEs. Written standard be damned; I’ll just bang out something that vaguely l

by stouset 10mo ago

This exact mindset is why so much software is irreparably broken and riddled with CVEs. Written standard be damned; I’ll just bang out something that vaguely looks like it handles the main cases I can remember off the top of my head. What could go wrong?

1718627440 10mo ago
Most commenters seem to miss that this is the throwaway code for HN, with a maximum allocated time of five minutes. I wouldn't commit it like this. The final code did cope with percent-encoding even though the project didn't took any user generated values at all. And I did read the RFCs, which honestly most developers I meet don't care to do. I also made sure the percent-decodation function did not rely on the ASCII ordering (it only relies on A-Z being continuous), because of portability (EBCDIC) and I have some professional honor.
- bruce343434 10mo ago
  I get that, but your initial comment implied you were about to showcase a counter to "Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL", but instead you showed "Poorly and incompletely parsing a single parameter can be done in less than 100 lines". You said you allocated 5 minutes max to this snippet, well in php this would be 5 seconds and 1 line. And it would be a proper solution. $name = $_GET['name'] ?? SOME_DEFAULT;
  - 1718627440 10mo ago
    And in the code in C it looks like this, which is also a proper solution, I did not measure the time, it took me to write that. name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name"); if (!name) name = SOME_DEFAULT; If you allow for GCC extensions, it looks like this: name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name") ?: SOME_DEFAULT;
    - shakna 10mo ago
      That would fail on a user supplying a multiple where you don't expect. > If multiple fields are used (i.e. a variable that may contain several values) the value returned contains all these values concatenated together with a newline character as separator.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - 1718627440 10mo ago
        Why? The actual implementation of cgiGetValue I am talking about does exactly that: > concatenated together with a newline character
      - stouset 10mo ago
        In GP’s defense, there is no standard behavior in the spec for handling repeated GET query parameters. Therefore any implementation-defined behavior is reasonable, including: keeping only the first, keeping only the last, keeping one at random, allowing access to all of them, concatenating them all with a separator, discarding the entire thing, etc.

by stouset 10mo ago

1718627440 10mo ago

Most commenters seem to miss that this is the throwaway code for HN, with a maximum allocated time of five minutes. I wouldn't commit it like this. The final code did cope with percent-encoding even though the project didn't took any user generated values at all. And I did read the RFCs, which honestly most developers I meet don't care to do. I also made sure the percent-decodation function did not rely on the ASCII ordering (it only relies on A-Z being continuous), because of portability (EBCDIC) and I have some professional honor.

bruce343434 10mo ago
I get that, but your initial comment implied you were about to showcase a counter to "Hundreds of lines just to grab a query parameter from a URL", but instead you showed "Poorly and incompletely parsing a single parameter can be done in less than 100 lines". You said you allocated 5 minutes max to this snippet, well in php this would be 5 seconds and 1 line. And it would be a proper solution. $name = $_GET['name'] ?? SOME_DEFAULT;
- 1718627440 10mo ago
  And in the code in C it looks like this, which is also a proper solution, I did not measure the time, it took me to write that. name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name"); if (!name) name = SOME_DEFAULT; If you allow for GCC extensions, it looks like this: name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name") ?: SOME_DEFAULT;
  - shakna 10mo ago
    That would fail on a user supplying a multiple where you don't expect. > If multiple fields are used (i.e. a variable that may contain several values) the value returned contains all these values concatenated together with a newline character as separator.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 1718627440 10mo ago
      Why? The actual implementation of cgiGetValue I am talking about does exactly that: > concatenated together with a newline character
    - stouset 10mo ago
      In GP’s defense, there is no standard behavior in the spec for handling repeated GET query parameters. Therefore any implementation-defined behavior is reasonable, including: keeping only the first, keeping only the last, keeping one at random, allowing access to all of them, concatenating them all with a separator, discarding the entire thing, etc.