Xpath: whitespace encoding - jcr

I need to create an XPath query to select a JCR node whose name contains a whitespace character.
For instance: /jcr:root/foo bar/
But that results in an invalid query.
How should whitespaces be encoded in an XPath query?

Try using something like this XPath query:
/jcr:root/foo_x0020_bar/
The JSR-170 (JCR 1.0) specification defines how XPath can be used to query a JCR repository, and even though JSR-283 (or JCR 2.0) deprecated XPath as a query language, many of the implementations still support XPath along with the other query languages (including the more powerful JCR-SQL2).
Now, regarding the rules for escaping characters in XPath, JSR-170 states the following in Section 6.6.4.9:
The names of elements and attributes (corresponding to nodes and properties, respectively) within an XPath statement must correspond to the form in which they (notionally) appear in the document view. This means that spaces (and any other non-XML characters) within names must be encoded according to the rules described in 6.4.3 Escaping of Names.
Section 6.4.3 defines how such characters are escaped in names:
The escape character is the underscore (“_”). Any invalid character is escaped as _xHHHH_, where HHHH is the four-digit hexadecimal UTF-16 code for the character. When producing escape sequences the implementation should use lowercase letters for the hex digits a-f. When unescaping, however, both upper and lowercase alphabetic hexadecimal characters must be recognized.
Although you didn't ask about it, you can easily do the same query in JCR-SQL2:
SELECT * FROM [nt:base] WHERE ISSAMENODE('/foo_x0020_bar')

Related

How to split on unicode whitespace in kotlin

In Kotlin if we use:
string.split(Regex("\\s+"))
Then we can split a string into words separated by whitespace. However the string:
val string = "a\u2000b"
doesn't split since the regex doesn't match unicode whitespace characters.
I there a way to split the string on all whitespace characters?
Since Java 7 Pattern allows to specify the UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS-flag which would basically also work for your current issue:
Pattern.compile("\\s+", Pattern.UNICODE_CHARACTER_CLASS)
Unfortunately this isn't directly supported via RegexOption with Kotlins Regex yet. There is a known issue that also describes a workaround (KT-21094):
string.split("""(?U)\s+""".toRegex())
You (most probably) require Java 7+ for that to actually work. Alternatives could be to use other predefined character classes instead. However, you need to lookup the appropriate Pattern-javadoc for your Java version to ensure that it is actually working (or do it in a trial-error-manner ;-)).
I've used the following regex to match Unicode whitespace:
Regex("[\\p{javaWhitespace}\u00A0\u2007\u202F]+")
This works because while \s matches only Latin-1 whitespace, \p{javaWhitespace} matches everything for which Character.isWhitespace() is true.  For some reason, this doesn't include a few particular characters, which I've listed separately.
More info in the docs for Pattern.
Related fact: although java.lang.String.trim() doesn't remove non-breaking spaces or figure spaces, kotlin.String.trim() does!

REGEXP_REPLACE explanation

Hi may i know what does the below query means?
REGEXP_REPLACE(number,'[^'' ''-/0-9:-#A-Z''[''-`a-z{-~]', 'xy') ext_number
part 1
In terms of explaining what the function function call is doing:
It is a function call to analyse an input string 'number' with a regex (2nd argument) and replace any parts of the string which match a specific string. As for the name after the parenthesis I am not sure, but the documentation for the function is here
part 2
Sorry to be writing a question within an answer here but I cannot respond in comments yet (not enough rep)
Does this regex work? Unless sql uses different syntax this would appear to be a non-functional regex. There are some red flags, e.g:
The entire regex is wrapped in square parenthesis, indicating a set of characters but seems to predominantly hold an expression
There is a range indicator between a single quote and a character (invalid range: if a dash was required in the match it should be escaped with a '\' (backslash))
One set of square brackets is never closed
After some minor tweaks this regex is valid syntax:
^'' ''\-\/0-9:-#A-Z''[''-a-z{-~]`, but does not match anything I can think of, it is important to know what string is being examined/what the context is for the program in order to identify what the regex might be attempting to do
It seems like it is meant to replaces all ASCII control characters in the column or variable number with xy.
[] encloses a class of characters. Any character in that class matches. [^] negates that, hence all characters match, that are not in the class.
- is a range operator, e.g. a-z means all characters from a to z, like abc...xyz.
It seams like characters enclosed in ' should be escaped (The second ' is to escape the ' in the string itself.) At least this would make some sense. (But for none of the DBMS I found having a regexp_replace() function (Postgres, Oracle, DB2, MariaDB, MySQL), I found something in the docs, that would indicate this escape mechanism. They all use \, but maybe I missed something? Unfortunately you didn't tag which DBMS you're actually using!)
Now if you take an ASCII table you'll see, that the ranges in the expression make up all printable characters (counting space as printable) in groups from space to /, 0 to 9, : to #, etc.. Actually it might have been shorter to express it as '' ''-~, space to ~.
Given the negation, all these don't match. The ones left are from NUL to US and DEL. These match and get replaced by xy one by one.

Approximate search with openldap

I am trying to write a search that queries our directory server running openldap.
The users are going to be searching using the first or last name of the person they're interested in.
I found a problem with accented characters (like áéíóú), because first and last names are written in Spanish, so while the proper way is Pérez it can be written for the sake of the search as Perez, without the accent.
If I use '(cn=*Perez*)' I get only the non-accented results.
If I use '(cn=*Pérez*)' I get only accented results.
If I use '(cn=~Perez)' I get weird results (or at least nothing I can use, because while the results contain both Perez and Pérez ocurrences, I also get some results that apparently have nothing to do with the query...
In Spanish this happens quite a lot... be it lazyness, be it whatever you want to call it, the fact is that for this kind of thing people tend NOT to write the accents because it's assumend all these searches work with both options (I guess since Google allowes it, everybody assumes it's supposed to work that way).
Other than updating the database and removing all accents and trimming them on the query... can you think of another solution?
You have your ~ and = swapped above. It should be (cn~=Perez). I still don't know how well that will work. Soundex has always been strange. Since many attributes are multi-valued including cn you could store a second value on the attribute that has the extended characters converted to their base versions. You would at least have the original value to still go off of when you needed it. You could also get real fancy and prefix the converted value with something and use the valuesReturnFilter to filter it out from your results.
#Sample object
dn:cn=Pérez,ou=x,dc=y
cn:Pérez
cn:{stripped}Perez
sn:Pérez
#etc.
Then modify your query to use an or expression.
(|(cn=Pérez)(cn={stripped}Perez))
And you would include a valuesReturnFilter that looked like
(!(cn={stripped}*))
See RFC3876 http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/rfc/rfc3876.txt for details. The method for adding a request control varies by what platform/library you are using to access the directory.
Search filters ("queries") are specified by RFC2254.
Encoding:
RFC2254
actually requires filters (indirectly defined) to be an
OCTET STRING, i.e. ASCII 8-byte String:
AttributeValue is OCTET STRING,
MatchingRuleId
and AttributeDescription
are LDAPString, LDAPString is an OCTET STRING.
The standard on escaping: Use "<ASCII HEX NUMBER>" to replace special characters
(https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4515#page-4, examples https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4515#page-5).
Quote:
The <valueencoding> rule ensures that the entire filter string is a
valid UTF-8 string and provides that the octets that represent the
ASCII characters "*" (ASCII 0x2a), "(" (ASCII 0x28), ")" (ASCII
0x29), "\" (ASCII 0x5c), and NUL (ASCII 0x00) are
represented as a backslash "\" (ASCII 0x5c) followed by the two hexadecimal digits
representing the value of the encoded octet.
Additionally, you should probably replace all characters that semantically modify the filter (RFC 4515's grammar gives a list), and do a Regex replace of non-ASCII characters with wildcards (*) to be sure. This will also help you with characters like "é".

RegEx to find % symbols in a string that don't form the start of a legal two-digit escape sequence?

I would like a regular expression to find the %s in the source string that don't form the start of a valid two-hex-digit escaped character (defined as a % followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits, upper or lower case) that can be used to replace only these % symbols with %25.
(The motivation is to make the best guess attempt to create legally escaped strings from strings of various origins that may be legally percent escaped and may not, and may even be a mixture of the two, without damaging the data intent if the original string was already correctly encoded, e.g. by blanket re-encoding).
Here's an example input string.
He%20has%20a%2050%%20chance%20of%20living%2C%20but%20there%27s%20only%20a%2025%%20chance%20of%20that.
This doesn't conform to any encoding standard because it is a mix of valid escaped characters eg. %20 and two loose percentage symbols. I'd like to convert those %s to %25s.
My progress so far is to identify a regex %[0-9a-z]{2} that finds the % symbols that are legal but I can't work out how to modify it to find the ones that aren't legal.
%(?![0-9a-fA-F]{2})
Should do the trick. Use a look-ahead to find a % NOT followed by a valid two-digit hexadecimal value then replace the found % symbol with your %25 replacement.
(Hopefully this works with (presumably) NSRegularExpression, or whatever you're using)
%(?![a-fA-F0-9]{2})
That's a percent followed by a negative lookahead for two hex digits.

why ldap search return all results when using %?

When I search one ldap server using the following filter
(cn=%*)
It return all results under the base dn? LDAP treat '%' specially? But I haven't found any description about it.
What is your directory server ?
Are you sure tha '%' is not replace by your command line interpreter or your compiler ?
According to RFC2254 % is not a special character
If a value should contain any of the following characters
Character ASCII value
---------------------------
* 0x2a
( 0x28
) 0x29
\ 0x5c
NUL 0x00
the character must be encoded as the backslash '\' character (ASCII
0x5c) followed by the two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII
value of the encoded character. The case of the two hexadecimal
digits is not significant.
This simple escaping mechanism eliminates filter-parsing ambiguities
and allows any filter that can be represented in LDAP to be
represented as a NUL-terminated string. Other characters besides the
ones listed above may be escaped using this mechanism, for example,
non-printing characters.
For example, the filter checking whether the "cn" attribute contained
a value with the character "" anywhere in it would be represented as
"(cn=\2a*)".
Note that although both the substring and present productions in the
grammar above can produce the "attr=*" construct, this construct is
used only to denote a presence filter.