[icedtea-web] RFC: PR766 javaws fails to parse an <argument> node that contains CDATA

[Deepak Bhole]

* Omair Majid <omajid at redhat.com> [2011-09-16 18:03]:
> Hi,
> 
> As explained in the bug report [1], icedtea-web ignores CDATA
> sections in JNLP files. I dug into the parser code a bit and found a
> few things.
> 
> The code that sanitizes comments from jnlp files (sanitizeInput)
> actually removes CDATA sections along with comments. This is
> probably a bug.
>

Agreed. I don't know why CDATA is being thrown away either.
 
> (As an aside, I suspect that the reason this is done separately from
> the main parser is because the main parser is a rather strict XML
> parser and some of the locations where comments can appear in jnlp
> files are not accepted by the XML standard. See
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449160 for examples of
> jnlp files that contain invalid comments)
> 
> The NanoXML parser itself can parse and see CDATA sections. However,
> it is not quite perfect. It has trouble parsing when CDATA sections
> appear in certain places, or are surrounded by certain elements.
> 
> I have attached 2 patches. The first patch adds a set of test cases,
> and the second makes the sanitizer skip special sections and just
> remove comments.
> 
> Running the junit tests (including the ones in the patch) shows:
> Before fix: 5 Errors, 3 failures
> After fix: 7 Errors, 1 failure.
> 
> The appearance of 2 new errors is a little surprising. But it turns
> out that the additional failures are being caused in JNLPMatcher
> tests - CDATA sections that were previously being sanitized away are
> now being fed to the parser which is failing to handle them. I will
> post a patch to address this later.
> 
> Any thoughts or comments?
> 

So the changes to the code make it handle comments now, correct? And the
changes to handle CDATA will be in another patch? Is there a risk that
passing of CDATA to the parser might start breaking existing apps (where
CDATA was being thrown, but the app continued to work)?

Also, please post changelog.

Thanks,
Deepak