[Rt-devel] Encoding bug in ticket creation

Otmar Lendl ol at bofh.priv.at
Tue Aug 26 05:51:02 EDT 2008


On 2008/08/15 11:08, Jesse Vincent <jesse at bestpractical.com> wrote:
> >
> > Aug 15 09:03:13 web1 RT: Attachment insert failed - ERROR:  invalid  
> > byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xf60a436f HINT:  This error can  
> > also happen if the byte sequence does not match the encoding  
> > expected by the server, which is controlled by "client_encoding". (/ 
> > opt/rt3/lib/RT/Attachment_Overlay.pm:153)

> > I'm currently using RT 3.8.1rc5 with PostgreSQL 8.3.
> >
> 
> What version of DBD::Pg? What version of Perl?
> 
> Does it happen if you submit the same thing by email or a custom field  
> contains an ö?

FYI, I'm seeing the same error. 

Here it's RT 3.7.21 / one of the RTIR milestone releases. The rest is
Debian stable, thus libdbd-pg-perl at 1.49-2, perl at 5.8.8-7etch3.

In my case it's triggered by an incoming email, and I see the error in
the postgres logfile as well:

2008-08-26 11:25:07 CEST ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe92064
2008-08-26 11:25:07 CEST HINT:  This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by "client_encoding".

Drilling down on the email (It really pays to keep a copy of each
incoming mail) I found it labeled as:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

There are a few signs of QP being applied, e.g.

---------------------------------------------------------------=20

Now the kicker: the mail has a legal disclaimer appended (NOT
attached!), which containes 8-bit characters. Checking the 
encoding shows that they are in latin1 and not utf-8.

Great. In other words, the incoming mail is invalid. (removing the
disclaimer makes RT indeed happy.)

Well, this is suboptimal. As a CERT, we can't just ignore slightly
broken mails. Any ideas?

/ol
-- 
-=-  Otmar Lendl  --  ol at bofh.priv.at  -=-


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