2024-03-11 12:35:32

by James Prestwood

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Subject: iw hex escapes SSID, but not other fields

Hi,

It was reported to me that some of our tooling (which parses iw output)
fails due to a network using a WPS device name with non utf-8
characters. I see that for SSID fields there is specific handling for
escaping non utf8 bytes, but not for the WPS Device Name (nor any other
fields AFAICT).

Before you rip me a new one for using iw output like this I have since
removed this and now use IWD's DBus API :) But older versions of the
software do still parse iw output. Just wanted to report this since iw
does print to stdout, so it does seem like it should try and escape
those bytes when possible, like it does for SSIDs.

Side note, I see the JSON patches are progressing which is probably
going to be the proper way to use iw as an automated tool going forward.
I haven't looked at those in detail (maybe its already taken care of),
but the above issue will likely need to be handled since JSON requires
utf-8.

Thanks,

James