How do I allow the use of colons (:) for shortUrls?

[vzrenggamani]

I want to use a colon as the form of the shortURL I want to use? But YOURLS doesn't seem to allow it (sanitised?).

Is there any way to bypass the colon?
Thank you very much.

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name
2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986
3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2053132/is-a-colon-safe-for-friendly-url-use

[dgw]

Make a copy of the sample hyphens-in-urls plugin and modify it to add colons into the allowed charset.

[vzrenggamani]

Thank you, but i encounter some "new problems here", i can't add new link with these colon, its return new error.. event the database are in clean state

[dgw]

Hmm… Let me summarize what I found in the short time I had available to debug this today.

It appears that some parts of the pre-shortening logic to validate keywords run a yourls_sanitize_keyword() function without the parameter to perform sanitization against the shorturl charset. Without that parameter, the function sanitizes the input keyword as if it is a URL instead—and this code path removes colons.

Some simple test code run on the CLI (php test.php) helped me track down a possibility or two:

<?php
require_once('includes/load-yourls.php');

echo( "Sanitize keyword: " . yourls_sanitize_keyword('some:colon:thing') . "\n");
echo( "Sanitize keyword(true): " . yourls_sanitize_keyword('some:colon:thing', true) . "\n");
echo( "free? " . yourls_keyword_is_free('some:colon:thing') . "\n" );
echo( "taken? " . yourls_keyword_is_taken('some:colon:thing') . "\n" );
echo( "reserved? " . yourls_keyword_is_reserved('some:colon:thing') . "\n" );

This outputs:

Sanitize keyword:
Sanitize keyword(true): some:colon:thing
free?
taken?
reserved? 1

I haven't traced it any further than this yet, but I think you are running into a core bug, where during the check for "reserved-ness" the keyword is being incorrectly treated as a URL and gets sanitized to empty-string if it contains a colon. There are some other checks in the yourls_keyword_is_reserved() function, but sanitization gone wrong seems the most likely to cause this.

It'll need more investigation. I'm on a work trip this week, but hopefully @LeoColomb or @ozh will have time to take a look if I can't get back to it within a day or two.

[vzrenggamani]

Things got complicated by then :), so no "temp" fix for this issues yet. Thank for the time to investigate this issues..