[Discuss] Seeking information on binaries called "entities" and "fixup"

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

In the 'strings' output, I noticed a typo - perfect for searching code
because you hope people don't make too many of the SAME typos across
multiple projects.

What I noticed is that one of the entities was &pount; (instead of £)
 When searching OHLOH (now Black Duck), it found 177 matches.  Sadly their
engine does not search literal strings even when they say they do... they
ignore the & and the ;  Still, it's a really good start at a very small
haystack for finding the original source of this code.
https://code.ohloh.net/search?s=%26pount

Then I added the term brvbar in a compound search, but that turned up zero
results - which means that this original source is not found in their
database.


On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 1:42 AM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:

> What's the big picture that you are trying to accomplish with the
> script? Presenting the Telecom Digest on a web site? Maybe an
> off-the-shelf mail archiving tool is a better way to go? (Like MHonArc.)
>

Agreed, if you just want to put the Digest on the web, then I'd feed it to
MHonArc, or similar.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the MHonArc sources to see if there were such
files (entities and fixup), but no.  MHonArc is written in Perl.  That
said, there is quite a bit of code to deal with sanitizing or escaping
content for conversion to HTML for display.  To wit:
http://www.mhonarc.org/release/MHonArc/latest/lib/mhtxtplain.pl
http://www.mhonarc.org/release/MHonArc/latest/lib/mhtxtenrich.pl
http://www.mhonarc.org/release/MHonArc/latest/lib/mhtxthtml.pl

And, even with that, there is a big security warning on the homepage for
yet another script injection vulnerability.  That's because MHonArc doesn't
fully parse the HTML, nor does it use a white-listing approach.  Basically,
with MHonArc, you should not enable HTML in your mail archives.  Despite
the obvious "weakness" of MHonArc, I'm simply pointing out the obvious that
rolling your own solution that mimics MHonArc's feature set would be quite
a project.


>
> What language is the script written in? 'fixup' remains a mystery,
>

Fixup is a mystery, but at least one thing it probably did was deal with
angle brackets and keywords.


> but
> you probably know enough about 'entities' to replace it with some
> in-line code. Greg gave you a PHP example. It could be done as a
> one-liner in Perl, with the assistance of a module.
>



Greg Rundlett
http://eQuality-Tech.com
http://freephile.org