Mangled names in highlights

[lheckemann]

Description

When I try to highlight a user with square brackets in their name, the resulting message appears mangled. E.g. when I highlighted sphalerite[test] on the IRC Bridges room, it appeared as @freenode_sphalerite%5Btest%5D:matrix.org:

When Mikaela highlighted the same user, it appeared fine:

I noticed that this difference appears in the source of the messages as well: my highlight had <a href="https://matrix.to/#/@freenode_sphalerite%5Btest%5D:matrix.org"> while Mikaela's had <a href="https://matrix.to/#/@freenode_sphalerite[test]:matrix.org">.

Steps to reproduce

• Highlight an IRC-bridged user with a name containing square brackets (not tested with regular matrix users)

Expected: appears as sphalerite[test]

Actual: appears as @freenode_sphalerite%5Btest%5D:matrix.org

Log: Sent

Version information

• Platform: Web app

For the web app:

• Browser: Firefox 55.0.2
• OS: NixOS (linux) 17.03
• URL: riot.im/app and riot.im/staging

Also tested on…

• Browser: Chromium 60.0.3112.78
• OS: NixOS (linux) 17.03
• URL: riot.im/app

[t3chguy]

looks like a state mismatch, could you go into settings scroll to bottom and clear cache and reload
seems like your client doesn't have the displayname of that user and so its falling back to MXID

[lheckemann]

No, that didn't help.

Full source of an example message:

{
  "origin_server_ts": 1504641691881,
  "sender": "@sphalerite:matrix.org",
  "event_id": "$15046416911557180tqAdP:matrix.org",
  "unsigned": {
    "age": 1028,
    "transaction_id": "m1504641691682.0"
  },
  "content": {
    "body": "sphalerite[test]: ",
    "msgtype": "m.text",
    "formatted_body": "<a href=\"https://matrix.to/#/@freenode_sphalerite%5Btest%5D:matrix.org\">sphalerite[test]</a>:",
    "format": "org.matrix.custom.html"
  },
  "type": "m.room.message",
  "room_id": "!tckjEObrtDIGmCBjwX:matrix.org"
}

[grahamperrin]

OK, I found the incident I was seeking. From #4867 (comment) (2017-09-15) affecting /develop/:

Strangely, I have no recollection of the bug biting /app/ at any time in the months since then.

[grahamperrin]

From the closure of Hilarity ensues when clicking on a user whose display name ends in ] · Issue #5474:

… same cause, lack of escaping, so closing as dup (of 4867)

[Ralith]

This has been an issue for more than a year. What is necessary to get riot to stop mangling these? It makes pills a significant regression over historical behavior.

Note that the issue is also triggered by \, and does not manifest in the entry box.

[Ralith]

Any hope of a fix in the forseeable future?

[jryans]

At the moment, this is part of a long backlog of paper cuts, each of which seems important on its own. I'll mark this "help-wanted" to hopefully encourage a PR to be submitted here.

[Ralith]

If this isn't considered a priority, maybe it shouldn't be labeled "major, p1"? It's annoying enough to constantly be hitting this issue, and being led to believe that it's considered important when it's actually very low priority doesn't help.

[jryans]

Nudging down to p2, as that seems to be closer to current priority in practice. It's still quite a bad issue when you hit it, so major seems appropriate.

[jryans]

(In general though, the issue priorities should be viewed as a very fuzzy relative ordering. We would like to get to the p1 issues before the p2 issues, etc. There's also lots of room to clean up older issues that may no longer apply, etc. Issue tracking is a best effort system that continually evolves over time.)

[Ralith]

This is still happening, e.g. with backticks.