VB.NET hardcoding with obfuscation trouble - vb.net

I need to hardcode a string in my source code and make an "if clause check" to see if the user entered input is the same or not. I am also using EAZfuscator.net for obfuscating the code.
However, when ı use the obfuscator, I think it changes my hardcoded string and I can not perfrom the check. How can I overcome this problem? Can I use HEX values instead. How can I find the HEX values for string characters? I use webcomverters but can not seem to get the correct characters.
Thanks for all the help!

Related

How to determine Thousands Separator using Format in VBA

I would like to determine the Thousand Separator used while running a VBA Code on a target machine without resolving to calling system built-in functions such as (Separator = Application.ThousandsSeparator).
I am using the following simple code using 'Format':
ThousandSeparator = Mid(Format(1000, "#,#"), 2, 1)
The above seems to work fine, and would like to confirm if this is a safe method of doing it without resorting to system calls.
I would expect the result to be a single char string in the form of , or . or ' or a Space as applicable to the locale on the machine.
Please note that I want to only use a language statement such as Format or similar (no sys calls). Also this relates to Thousands Separator not Decimal Separator. This article Using VBA to detect which decimal sign the computer is using does not help or answer my question. Thanks
Thanks in advance.
The strict answer to whether it is safe to use Format to get the thousands separator is No.
E.g. on Windows, it is possible to enter up to three characters into the Thousands Separator field in the regional settings in the control panel.
Suppose you enter asd and click OK.
If you now call Format(1000, "#,#") it will give you 1a000. That is only the first letter of your thousands separator. You have failed to retrieve it correctly.
Reading the registry:
? CreateObject("WScript.Shell").RegRead("HKCU\Control Panel\International\sThousand")
you get back asd in full.
To be fair, the Excel international properties do not seem to be of much help either. Application.International(xlThousandsSeparator) in this situation will return the separator originally defined in your computer's locale, not the value you've overridden it to.
Having that said, the practical answer is Yes, because it would appear (and if you happen to know for sure, please post an answer here) that there is no culture with multi-char thousand separator (even in China where scary things like 1億2345万6789 or 1億2345萬6789 exist, they happen to be represented with just one UTF-16 character), and you probably are happy to ignore the people who decided to play with their locale settings in that fashion.

Mid() don't extract string in accurate position

I am using VBA in Ms Access environment, to handle long string (memo field storing HTML originally).
After positioning by Instr(), I put the position into Mid(vStr,vStartPos,vEndPos-vStartPos+1) to extract the string, but the output doesn't match. I have already carefully checked this in immediate windows, as well as NotePad++. What I can say is Instr() and NotePad++ have given the same counting result, while Mid() is different. Mid()'s result are former than Instr()'s in some cases, and latter in other cases. I don't know the reason, and can just believe Mid() use different mechanism or have defeative (surprised!) in handling long string mixed with single-byte and bi-byte chars (but this is common in the world, and meet no problem before), and possibly some special characters.
I believe I need to custom-make a Mid() function. Any idea how to do it effectively and efficiently?
Thanks all for your reply. After I created a custom Mid() by RegEx and find that the problem has no change, I have found out the silly mistake I made. The Instr() and Mid() have no problem, but the string has been carelessly modified between them. So this case should be closed now.

IOS JSON escaping special characters

I'm working in IOS and trying to pass some content to a web server via an NSURLRequest. On the server I have a PHP script setup to accept the request string and convert it into an JSON object using the Zend_JSON framework. The issue I am having is whenever the character "ø" is in any part of the request parameters, then the request string is cut short by one character.
Request string before going to server.
[{"description":"Blah blah","type":"Russebuss","name":"Roscoe Simulator","appVersion":"1.0.20","osVersion":"IOS 5.1","phone":"5555555","country":"Østfold","udid":"bed164974ea0d436a43f3cdee0e005a1"}]
Request string on server before any parsing
[{"description":"Blah blah","type":"Russebuss","name":"Roscoe Simulator","appVersion":"1.0.20","osVersion":"IOS 5.1","phone":"5555555","country":"Nord-Trøndelag","udid":"bed164974ea0d436a43f3cdee0e005a1"}
Everything looks exactly the same except the final closing ] is missing. I'm thinking it's having an issue when converting the string to UTF-8, but not sure the correct way to fix this issue.
Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening?
first of all do not trust the xcode console in such cases. you never know which coding the console is actually using.
second, escape the invalid characters before you build you json string. easiest way would probably to make sure you are using the same unicode representation, like utf-8, all the time.
third, if there are still invalid characters use a json lib with a parser (does the encoding). validate the output by parsing back to e.g. NSString. or validate the output manually by using a web form like http://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/
the badest way is to replace the single characters in the string, build your json and convert back. one way to do this could be to replace e.g an german ä with its unicode representaion U+00E4 (http://www.utf8-chartable.de/).
Thats the way I do it. I am glad that I nerver needed to go further than step three and this is the step you should do anyway to keep your code simple.
Please try to use Zends internal json Encoding:
Zend_Json::$useBuiltinEncoderDecoder = true;
should fix your issue.

iRegex for date in user entered textfield

I have an input box and the user can write his DOB(mm/dd/yyyy) into the box.
Before I save the data I like to test for valid input. I am using Regexlite.h and Regexlite.m.I have the regular expression too. I want to compare the regex to the user entered value in text box.But am not knowing how to do it.
Any idea how to test for a valid date? (in .NET I use a simple regex but for the iPhone sdk I am a bit helpless) - but somebody must have been done this before.
Here is a regex you can use to parse it if your looking for something else just leave me a comment
^\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{4}$
I think that you should do more validation than that---you don't want anything happening on 30 February nor allow a birth-year of 1001 and 3001 (time-travellers and Methusaleh's Children can go hang).
Perhaps someone cleverer than I could do this all with regular expressions, but I'd suggest just looking at the string and using some logic.
Why are you not using UIDatePicker to prevent user to enter your own not valid date.

Rails ActiveRecord: Inserting text containing unprintable/weird characters

I am inserting some text from scraped web into my database. some of the fields in the string have unprintable/weird characters. For example,
if text is "C__O__?__P__L__E__T__E",
then the text in the database is stored only as "C__O__"
I know about h(), strip_tags()... sanitize, ... etc etc. But I do not want to sanitize this SQL. The activerecord logs the SQL correctly, and when run in phpMySQL, the query is executed correctly. something happens between the SQL query generation and it being executed.
Help is much appreciated.
Just replace the question mark in the string with a string containing a question mark, I haven't found any other way either:
["C__O__?__P__L__E__T__E", '?']
works perfectly.
Can you escape the question mark using "\?"?
Hmmmm.. using CGI escape, I found out that the character coming in the system is not what I expected it to be. It is not a question mark (%3F) but a question mark (%D5).
C__%D5__M__P__L__%80___T__%80__
C__%3F__M__P__L__%3F___T__%3F__
Eventually I gsubbed out the non-printable characters before saving.
gsub(/[^[:print:]]/, '')
Only after removing the invalid characters in my string, was I able to save the item properly.
None of the other solutions worked, partially because the problem was not understood clearly upfront.
I know this is way late, but I ran into the same problem when we were trying to process a file as UTF-8 that actually used the ISO-8859-1 character encoding. I suspect you had a similar issue in your scraping where you assumed the wrong encoding and it ended up causing things to fail.