• (nodebb)

    <CommandLine>%26lt%3Bcomment%26gt%3Becho+%26quot%3BFRIST%26quot%3B%26lt%3B%2Fcomment%26gt%3B</CommandLine>

  • Little Bobby Tables (unregistered)

    Possibly this element was generated by an automatic XML generator which was first passed through a sanitation method which did a "do while" until all instances of pesky escape characters are translated. I saw something similar in the early days of development of a female dog of a system in which one of the developers was "clever". And by "clever" I mean both "special" and "certified".

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    new comment here

  • kdgregory (unregistered)

    Obligatory pedantic comment: you actually can't store anything you want in CDATA. At least in XML 1.0, which is what everybody still uses, and which doesn't like certain non-printing characters, no matter where they appear in the document. What sucks is that some early serializers would write these non-printing characters, and the parser written by the same team would reject them.

  • Mark (unregistered)

    Reminds me a bit of https://xkcd.com/1638/ (Backslashes)

  • rick (unregistered)

    The article source is TRWTF: <CommandLine>&amp;lt%3bPATH&amp;gt%3bSOME_VALUE_HERE&amp;lt%3b/PATH&amp;gt%3b</CommandLine>

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to kdgregory

    @kdgregory completely agree - if the data is arbitrary clean you unfortunately need to base-64 encode (or similar)

  • Franq (unregistered)

    "But, it also means..." you really, really need an editor. Or patience. Or text-to-speech these back to yourself. For the love of God.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    this reminds me of a scene in an old online comic "absurd notions": a small group of programmers tried to write their own operating system, and called it "tostds"..."the OS that doesn't suck".

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    http://www.jarnot.com/archives/2013/05/ode-to-a-shipping-label.php

    ODE TO A SHIPPING LABEL

    Once there was a little o, with an accent on top like só.

    It started out as UTF8, (universal since ’98), but the program only knew latin1, and changed little ó to “ij” for fun.

    A second program saw the “ij” and said “I know HTML entity!” So “ij” was smartened to “&ATILDE;&SUP3;” and passed on through happily.

    Another program saw the tangle (more precisely, ampersands to mangle) and thus the humble “&TILDE;&SUP3;” became “&AMP;ATILDE;&AMP;SUP3;”

  • Eric Gregory (github)

    Given the URL encoding, I have to wonder if it's HTML? You can nest XML within XML, but there's a special layer of hell for those who attempt to nest HTML within XML.

  • (nodebb)

    Just for the record, I am NOT THAT "Carl W"

  • Simon (unregistered) in reply to Eric Gregory

    Even if it's HTML, CDATA would be adequate. That's what the JSF UI framework does – AJAX-messaging is all XML, but those messages usually contain blocks of UI that were rendered into HTML and JS on the server and returned to the browser for splicing into the page. Those blocks are always CDATA encoded, since the HTML can't safely be treated as nested XML.

  • (nodebb) in reply to kdgregory

    What sucks is that some early serializers would write these non-printing characters, and the parser written by the same team would reject them.

    I had to manually work around this just a week or two ago - someone had managed to get a chr(5) into an XML document I had to read, and my parser flatly refused to deal with it.

    I wound up doing one run for the days prior to that document, another run for the days after that document, then I did a request in SoapUI for the offending date, grabbed the output, stripped the junk character, and converted it into SQL statements to update the affected records directly. (I did try making a copy of the process that read from a flat file, but somehow even though I let it build its XML definition from the exact file I was trying to read, it failed to read any data from it.)

  • iWantToKeepAnon (unregistered)

    And let’s not even start on XSLT and XQuery.

    Those are both very very handy and work great in their target domains. Sound like sliding in some sour grapes and doesn't really pertain to the WTF. :/

  • (nodebb)

    "CDada"

    I liked it.

  • Supersonic Tumbleweed (unregistered)

    I like how the title is a reference to Dadaism, a movement in art.

  • Supersonic Tumbleweed (unregistered)

    I like how the title is a reference to Dadaism, a movement in art.

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