Re: Strange characters in names of users and groups

On 19/12/2024 09:11, Christoph Pleger wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am using dokuwiki, a WIKI programmed in PHP and I have the problem 
> that, in spite of the granted access rights inside DokuWiki, , members 
> of a certain user group are not able to access parts of the Wiki they 
> should be able to access. To find the cause of the problem, I added 
> some lines to the DokuWiki code to get get more debug ouput.
>
> So, from the login, I get the following debug ouput:
>
> user = christoph.pleger
> groups = prof
>
> But from checking if the logged in user has access rights for a 
> specific Wiki document, I get the following debug output:
>
> user = christoph%2epleger
> groups = prof%a
>
> So, my suspicion is that the problem is caused by those strange 
> character sequences "%2e" and "%a". What can be done to remove them an 
> get the same user and groups strings as above?
>
> Regards
>   Christoph

The %<digits> encoding is RFC 3986 URI Percent Encoding[0]. The php 
functions urlencode() and rawurlencode() can be used to perform this, 
tho neither of these will encode '.' (%2e) (because it's an unreserved 
character[1]).

The %a should almost certainly be %0a (because % is supposed to always 
be followed by exactly 2 hex digits) which represents a newline ("\n")

Given these, it looks like a custom-written encoding function has been used.

Assuming you haven't written any custom code modifications, whether or 
not any of this is expected, or is the root of your overall problem with 
access rights would be a query for the dokuwiki project and/or the 
developers of any relevant plugins you may have installed.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.3