source list - running with -r fails to escape pipe (|) char

[jborean93]

What You Are Seeing?

When using choco source list -r, values the already contain a pipe | character are not escaped making it impossible to reliably parse the output programmatically. An example output where the source name and username contain a pipe is

test|pipe|https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/|False|user|pipe||0|False|False|False

When you compare it to the default API

Chocolatey|https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/|False|||0|False|False|False

You can see there are 2 more "columns" because both the name and user column contain the pipe char.

What is Expected?

Not sure, usual psv practices are to either quote all the values or just quote the values that contain the delimiter char, e.g.

"test|pipe"|https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/|False|"user|pipe"||0|False|False|False

How Did You Get This To Happen? (Steps to Reproduce)

Create the source with

choco source add --name "test|pipe" --source https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/ --user "user|pipe" --password password

List the sources with

choco source list -r

and you get

test|pipe|https://chocolatey.org/api/v2/|False|user|pipe||0|False|False|False

[ferventcoder]

@jborean93 interesting - that's definitely unexpected. Something we should look to fix.

[ferventcoder]

This has been completed for Chocolatey v0.10.12.

[ferventcoder]

This was implemented on stable at 7f15fb0

[jborean93]

@ferventcoder thanks for the update. I haven't tested to see if it's possible but wouldn't the changes in 7f15fb0 mean that if the field already has a double quote the parsing would now be broken? There is a .net class you can potentially use called TextFieldParser but it looks like it's not in .NET core which may be an issue in the future.

[ferventcoder]

@jborean93 how would the field have a double quote? Perhaps there is a bit more we should do here. I could see an apostrophe, but a quote in the middle of the username would be really weird. However, so would a pipe, and here we are. Thoughts?

[jborean93]

Oh looking at the commit it is only quoting the username field but the repo name itself can also contain pipe characters. I'm just trying to think of a way that makes this generic to anything creating a PSV and not just a field within source.

However as for why the username would contain a quote, I would have no idea. People seem to want to do really weird things and being defensive about it is probably best. I did try to add a source with the " character but that just broke the argument parsing so someone would have to manually edit the XML to add this character. So in that sense it's probably not required, just thinking of future proofing.

[ferventcoder]

@jborean93 added for names as well.

[jborean93]

@ferventcoder I take back what I said about not being able to use ". We actually test out both | and " as the source name, as well as some other non alphanumeric chars in our win_chocolatey_source test because of this issue https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/test/integration/targets/win_chocolatey_source/defaults/main.yml. We parse the XML directly because we couldn't parse the command output reliably and this makes sure we don't regress in our feature offering for the future.

This means that the simple quote the value with " if it contains | still won't work in these cases.

[ferventcoder]

@jborean93 perhaps open a new issue on this?

[jborean93]

Honestly I'll probably give up on the -r output in favour of #1252. Having the output in JSON is a lot easier to parse for many libraries and is built into .NET.