Item12099: META parser baulks if META badly formed

Yesterday I noticed that META:TOPICINFO in CommandsAndCGIScripts had extra whitespace introduced, something like:

• META:TOPICINFO { author = "ProjectContributor" date = "131546565" format = "1.1" version = "1"}

After:

• my ($meta, $topicText) = Foswiki::Func::readTopic( $w, $t );

When extracting TOPICINFO, I do not get 'keys' of author, date, format etc

I'm offered a key of "131546565" format, which is hardly to spec.

The parser should cope better and/or reject bad keys and/or reject the whole META line (leaving it as part of topic text).

I've had similar issues before.

-- JulianLevens - 26 Sep 2012

I'm particularly concerned by the GroupTemplate that's part of TopicUserMappingContrib the value of the META:PREFERENCE for ALLOWTOPICCHANGE is %URLPARAM{"topic"}% but this is parsed by meta as %URLPARAM{ which suggests that generating new wiki groups, via this contrib, will also be broken.

-- JulianLevens - 04 Dec 2012

That last point is probably caused by the META:PREFERENCE being created by a dev in the topic text. See http://foswiki.org/Sandbox/SetPrefTest where I create something similar. Here the parameter gets encoded, thus bypassing the issue.

The first issue above is also probably caused by the META:TOPICINFO line being created by a dev via a text editor etc. This suggests we need a dev tool during checkin to spot badly formed (unparseable) META

This does not mean that this issue is fixed par se, but save and load via Foswiki itself maybe OK. Better parsing would still be good (see also Item12100)

-- JulianLevens - 26 Mar 2013

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