From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2009-04-23T20:09:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing String#dump data?

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Andrew S. Townley <ast@atownley.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there was a better/safer way to parse string data
> that has been dumped using the String#dump method.  At the moment, I've
> been using regular expressions to do it, but that doesn't seem to work
> with unicode characters, since they get dumped as follows:
>
> irb(main):007:0> s = "€"
> => "€"
> irb(main):008:0> s.dump
> => "\"\\342\\202\\254\""
>
> On a lark, I figured that Ruby would be able to get them back, so I
> tried this:
>
> irb(main):009:0> x = eval s.dump
> => "€"
Maybe
eval s.dump if %r{\A".*"*\Z} === s.dump  && ! %r{#[{@]} === s.dump # not tested
is save, but I am not 100% sure
Cheers
Robert
>
> Which, of course, works.  However, I'm a bit leery of doing this from a
> safety perspective, because I really don't have any control over these
> strings, and I'd prefer not to allow the execution of arbitrary Ruby
> code every time I'm trying to restore strings (I need them serialized as
> appropriately escaped quoted literals).
>
> Has anyone else ever needed to do this, and, if so, how did you solve
> the problem.  I guess I could do another pass on the string looking for
> '\\[\n]+' values and try and combine them some way, but I'm not really
> sure how to do that either.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Cheers,
>
> ast
> --
> Andrew S. Townley <ast@atownley.org>
> http://atownley.org
>
>
>



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