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Handling of improper MXP tags

Handling of improper MXP tags

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts) bio Forum Administrator

Date

Wed 06 Jun 2001 03:28 AM (UTC)

Amended on Tue 24 Sep 2002 04:57 AM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message

Unexpected control characters or end-of-line

If MUSHclient receives one of the following characters inside an element or entity, collection of that element/entity is terminated with a debug message.



\n - newline

\r - carriage return

0x1B - "escape" character - shown as (esc) below

0xFF - IAC telnet sequence initiation

However version 3.27 onwards will accept the sequence IAC IAC (0xFF 0xFF) as being a single IAC (that is, the character ÿ).

Thus the following sequences would be invalid:



<color \n red>

<send  (esc) "go north" >

<!--  This comment has colours in it (esc)[310m -->

<!--  This is a multi-line comment \r\n -->

The purpose of this is to stop MUSHclient going into a lengthy "element collection" phase, possibly discarding hundreds of lines of MUD output, because someone accidentally started a comment and didn't finish it.

If such a sequence is received a message will be written to the debug window, providing the MXP debug level is not "none".

If some of the MUD output seems to go missing you are advised to set the debug level to "Errors" or "Warnings" and check the debug window periodically for messages.

Each message is prefixed with the line number in the output window which caused the error. You can use Ctrl+Alt+L to go to that line number.

Unknown/improper elements/entities

In MXP mode, MUSHclient will never display on the screen text received between:



< ..... and ..... >

& ..... and ..... ;

Thus MUD implementors always need to use the following substitutions for those characters:



< becomes: &lt;

& becomes: &amp;

For example, a seemingly harmless line like:



Written by John & Peter

... would result in everything after the & being discarded (with an error message).

Handling of unrecognised names

If an element or entity name is not recognised, then an error message will written to the debug window, if the MXP debug level is not "none". The element or entity in question will not be displayed in the output window.



<blah> - unknown element "blah"

&fish; - unknown entity "fish"

The purpose of these rules is to give a consistent way of processing MXP tags, and allow for future expansion. For example, if a new tag <status line> is invented, but you are using an older version of MUSHclient that doesn't support it, at least you won't see annoying tag names sprinkled throughout the output window.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Ikioi Shimo USA (5 posts)

Date

Reply #1 on Mon 23 Sep 2002 04:45 PM (UTC)

Message

I am using ver 3.25 and I love it so far, I am connecting to a moo, and they extensively use < and > all over the place. The do not use tags in any fashion though, but do use Pueblo, is there a way I can turn pueblo on, and have it not try to access tags? or mxp? I tried asking them to alter they display method, but despite my reasons, they didn't find it funny, or worth their time.

-Ikioi Shimo

Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts) bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #2 on Mon 23 Sep 2002 09:23 PM (UTC)

Message

Quote:

The do not use tags in any fashion though, but do use Pueblo

I do not understand this statement. To use Pueblo you must use tags, eg <b> for bold, <u> for underline and so on.

Pueblo, like HTML and XML, specifies that if you want to use "<" and ">" characters inside your text, but not as a tag, then you must represent them as < and > otherwise obvious confusion will arise where things look like tags but are not.

Some Pueblo and MXP implementations don't appear to do this properly, I suggest you advise them that they need to fix up their "<" and ">" signs if this is the case. However your statement that "they do not use tags" makes me wonder just what is going on.

If they need help fixing up the tags, I suggest taking a look at the web page I wrote about how to do that. It is at:



http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/addingservermxp.htm

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Ikioi Shimo USA (5 posts)

Date

Reply #3 on Tue 24 Sep 2002 12:34 PM (UTC)

Message

They only use pueblo for sound types and images, they dont seem to be using it for anything else, for one when the pueblo/mxp is off, the moo looks no different, except that urls are no longer highlighted, instead they use < and > for ansi art, and extensively. I am coming to the conclusion they probably would of been more effective trying to use MSP instead of pueblo, but I just play there I don't make any decisions.

-Ikioi Shimo

Posted by Shadowfyr USA (1,786 posts) bio

Date

Reply #4 on Tue 24 Sep 2002 06:51 PM (UTC)

Amended on Tue 24 Sep 2002 06:53 PM (UTC) by Shadowfyr

Message

Sounds too me like they decided to be sloppy about things and assumed that most clients (like zMud) would be sloppy about implimentation as well.

For instance this is straight out of the docs for Pueblo 2.0 and is used to play a sound:

<img xch_sound=play href="http://www.chaco.com/music/explosion.wav" event="complete" action="_on_explosion" md5="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx">

There does not appear to be any other commands that do so. They are expecting the client to recognize 'if' a command is valid and simply ignore it if not. As Nick has said, one decision in implimenting mushclient's design was to avoid buggy tags or, especially with MXP, unknown elements by hiding them instead of assuming that they are supposed to be displayed solely do to not being a valid command.

However if Pueblo itself is doing this then the designers are not reading their own documentation and neither are the people working on the moo you play, since it says very clearly in the docs that:

Upon receiving thisPUEBLOCLIENT command, the World may send the following sequence, to tell the Pueblo client to begin interpreting the World's output as HTML:

</xch_mudtext><img xch_mode=html>
...

and

...
3. Add HTML escaping. HTML has a few special characters that require escaping. You should convert these characters to the corresponding HTML sequence, as described in the following table. (Note: those trailing semicolons inside the strings are important.)


Character: HTML sequence:
<          &lt;
>          &gt;
&          &amp;
“          &quot;

It then shows a list of HTML tags you that are used, 'including' the one for playing a sound. It would seem to me that Nick has it right, but your admin don't. Note: If they used zMud to test and design the moo, then this is not a big surprise, since its implimentation does assume that invalid tags should be displayed. For debugging purposes this may have even been intentional, but it complete ignores the reason they tell you to use &lt, &gt, &amp and &quot in the specification. The normal characters are reserved specifically for tags and the fact that they happen to display correctly in zMud is a side effect of the way it handles errors in the tags, not imho what 'should' happen.

Posted by

Ikioi Shimo USA (5 posts)

Date

Reply #5 on Thu 26 Sep 2002 01:29 PM (UTC)

Message

I do not think your understanding the situation, all tags are invisible to the player, we never see a tag executed, they are not improperly using tags, and pueblo and zmud do not have an issue with this, what it is, is thus, MUSHclient tries to convert every < or > no matter where they are in the output as a tag, unless I have the MXP PUEBLO features turned off, they are using < and > as ascii art in the display screens, such as the ic display of the who list.
it is like this:
who
|C| Submitting query...
|C| Generating results from WHODATA.DB ...
|W|----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|W| <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< WITHMORE SECURE IDENTIFICATION NETWORK >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> |
|W|----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|W| ID | ALIAS | BROADCAST MESSAGE (ct) [54] |
|W|------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------+
|W| | Warren | ... we are about to embark upon a most unprecedented exp |
|W| | Sergiusz | My name is Sergiusz, brother of. I got me some c |
|W| | Sheen | and then the serpent struck.. |
|W| | Abdnago | If rubbin' frozen dirt in ya crotch is wrong, hey, I don |
|W| | Ono | Cutting edge designs for a up planet. |
|W| | eA011qzr | |
|W| | Mims | Hey, you know what might be a hoot? |
|W| | Flatline | You really don't want me to do that. |
|W| | WJF-Ops | Obey The Law - Dial 911 to request help |
|W| | Aurora | |
|W| | Xee | NLM StreetTerm Official Advertiser -=- Call 383-3745 |
|W| | Max | If I'm goin' out, I'm goin' out in style! (tm) |
|W| | Boo | Your worst ' nightmare |
|W| | Powers | There it is, the near-death star. |
|W|------+----------+----------------------------------------------------------+
|W| 31,000 flavors, Baskin Robbins, try some |
|W|----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

-Ikioi Shimo

Posted by

Ikioi Shimo USA (5 posts)

Date

Reply #6 on Thu 26 Sep 2002 01:31 PM (UTC)

Message

What I am trying to get around to, is there a way I can get the debugger to not cut out what it does not like from the text

-Ikioi Shimo

Posted by

Shadowfyr USA (1,786 posts)

Date

Reply #7 on Thu 26 Sep 2002 07:16 PM (UTC)

Amended on Thu 26 Sep 2002 07:18 PM (UTC) by Shadowfyr

Message

I know exactly what you are saying. I wanted to be able to use MXP to color tells, etc., but on a non-MXP mud and ran into the same problem. I also argued with Nick about this before and while I wouldn't mind some way to make invalid tags visible, I do understand why mushclient doesn't.

As I said, the fact that they are visible in zMud and Pueblo is not stated in the specs for them as being the 'normal' behavour, the issue is instead completely ignored. But neither of those clients have complex error handling for dealing with such bad tags and as Nick has tried to say, it does not make sense for them to work that way. For instance:

Lets say a mud has a hotel in it and the rooms are labelled -
<Room 1>
<Room 2>
<Room 3>

and some where along the line it is decided by to extend the specification, when used on mud where the rooms are stored in a database, so that the index number assigned to that room in the database is returned in a tag. Oops.. Now the room names are going to be incorrectly interpreted as ID tags for the new zMud mapper or whatever it was intended to be used for and not displayed. It is not a good idea for designer to ignore what the specification tells them they are supposed to be doing.

Pueblo and zMud allow invalid tags to be shown for 'debugging' purposes, the specification does not say that this must be the behavior, but it does imply that using < and > anyplace else, except in a tag, is wrong. Otherwise they wouldn't tell you to use the &lt, &gt replacements.

That said... You could try using a script to deal with this by going into the script settings and clicking the MXP tag. You would then place a sub name in Opening Tag: and use world.tell in the script to display the missing stuff. I didn't have much luck with my own experiments to do this, but then I tried to use the Error event, on the assumption that I didn't want to process 'all' tags for redisplay, just the ones I knew where wrong.

Note to you Nick: I told you this was going to come up. People that design things will look for the easiest way to do stuff, even if the method they use is completely wrong, and since neither the Pueblo or zMud spec force complience with the &lt and &gt requirement, guess what... :p

Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts) bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #8 on Thu 26 Sep 2002 10:54 PM (UTC)

Amended on Thu 26 Sep 2002 10:56 PM (UTC) by Nick Gammon

Message

I quote from the MXP spec at:



http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmud/mxp.htm

Quote:

In addition to Elements, you can also define "Entities." Entities are like macro string replacements. For example, in HTML, the entity < indicates the < or less-than symbol. Since a normal < symbol is interpreted as the start of an element tag, you must use < to refer to a less-than symbol directly. Entities are accessed by putting a & character in front of the entity name, and terminating the name with a ; character. All of the standard HTML entities are available in MXP, including the &#nnn; entity to insert character /nnn into the text stream. Note that nnn values less than 32 are ignored.

Note the use of the word "must" (my emphasis). The MXP spec requires that < symbols to be represented as < and a MUD that does not do that is not implementing it correctly.

Also in the Pueblo spec at:



http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/doc/manual/

Quote:

3. Add HTML escaping. HTML has a few special characters that require escaping. You should convert these characters to the corresponding HTML sequence, as described in the following table. (Note: those trailing semicolons inside the strings are important.)


  Character:	 HTML sequence:
     <	             &lt;
     >	             &gt;
     &	             &amp;
     "	             &quot;

I suppose the word "should" isn't as strong as "must" but for me it is strong enough. "Should convert" means to me that you should do this (if you want it to work), not you might if you feel like it.

In fact the sentence "HTML has a few special characters that require escaping" is pretty strong. "Require" means to me that you need to do it.

As both specs require that the "<" be converted to < I believe MUSHclient's implementation is correct, and I do not wish to encourage sloppy implementation by MUD writers by allowing incorrect tags to "slip through".

Quote:

I do not think your understanding the situation

Both Shadowfyr and I understand the problem - it is that the moo is not implementing Pueblo correctly. There are plenty of examples of it being done right, for instance my own implementation I referred to before, Dawn Of Time, PennMUSH, and others. I suggest you do one of:

Turn off Pueblo and do without the sound effects
Play another MUD
Convince the admins that they should fix up their < signs as per the spec

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts)

bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #9 on Thu 26 Sep 2002 10:59 PM (UTC)

Message

If they are only using Pueblo for sound effects and images (ie. in 2 places) it is simple enough to fix. All their output to players should automatically convert "<" to < and "&" to & and in those 2 places where they are actually using Pueblo tags they simply use a different output routine that doesn't do the conversion.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Ikioi Shimo USA (5 posts)

Date

Reply #10 on Fri 27 Sep 2002 02:59 PM (UTC)

Message

Well I guess that means I have to get one of the other clients, I love this client, but their moo is one of a kind, so I can't get a replacement for it, and they adamantly refuse to change their display output, because it works with other clients, they feel the fault is with this program, and no matter what I try to tell them, its "not their problem"

-Ikioi Shimo

Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts)

bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #11 on Fri 27 Sep 2002 09:30 PM (UTC)

Message

Sorry to hear that, but you can always turn off Pueblo. After all, people played MUDs for ages before Pueblo came along, and you can probably manage without the occasional sound effect.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Ettercap (2 posts)

Date

Reply #12 on Sun 26 Feb 2006 05:58 AM (UTC)

Message

Couldn't they do a work around by putting the client into lock locked mode (ESC[7z) when coming out of secure mode (ESC[1z) after sending the sound tag?

I'm using something like this to handle cat'ing files to players.

I defined:
MXP_BEG as ESC[1z (secure mode)
MXP_LOCK as ESC[7z (lock locked mode)
MXP_END as ESC[0z (open mode)

then send MXP_LOCK before cat'ing the file to the player and then MXP_END when I'm finished. It seems to work ok so far.

Is there a problem with doing it this way?

~Ettercap

Posted by

Mymyc (25 posts)

Date

Reply #13 on Fri 18 Jun 2010 10:34 AM (UTC)

Message

I play Achaea and I am about to write an auto walker using the Achaea server MXP tags, using room number and room names. But this is where the shit hit the fan, let me explain:

I switch MXP OFF in Mushclient to see the tags and
CONFIG MXP ON in the mud Achaea, and this is what I see an init string with tags, then I look around.

<VERSION><SUPPORT><!ELEMENT RNum ATT="id" FLAG="RoomNum" EMPTY><!ELEMENT RName FLAG="RoomName"><!ELEMENT RDesc FLAG="RoomDesc"><!ELEMENT RExits FLAG="RoomExit"><!ELEMENT Prompt FLAG="Prompt">You have turned MXP on and will now be sent MXP tags.

LOOK

<PROMPT>4220h, 2420m exkdb-</PROMPT>

<RNum 24137><RName>River around Delos</RName>.
<RDesc>The River Zaphar flows steadily to the southwest at a quick pace, corralled by highly angled banks. Cattails and grasses wave in the wind on the northwestern bank, while the tall reeds on the southeastern bank have been trampled flat by a careless wanderer. The clan registry of Delos is visible above the river, a constant flow of traffic travelling to and from the building. The riverbed is dark and muddy, the swift current constantly stirring up sediment and clouding the water.</RDesc> A large silver salmon flicks through the water.
<RExits>You see exits leading <COLOR #00FF00><SEND HREF="northeast">northeast</SEND></COLOR> and <COLOR #00FF00><SEND HREF="southwest">southwest</SEND></COLOR>.</RExits>

<PROMPT>4220h, 2420m exkdb-</PROMPT>

----------------------------------

I have a serious issue about MXP variables. Mush creates 4 variables properly mxp_roomname; mxp_roomdesc; mxp_roomexit; mxp_prompt. The mxp_roomnumber (or rnum) is missing.

As we can see in the above/below example the <RNum> tag is not followed by </RNum> closing tag:

<RNum 24137><RName>River around Delos</RName>.

Proper line should be this:

<RNum> 24137</Rnum><RName>River around Delos</RName>.

Am I right?

I think I am.

So I SWITCH MXP YES ALWAYS back in Mushclient, and begin to look or walk, and the MXP warning window keep saying (obviously) one-line warning messages whenewer I look or walk. Example:

W 5015: ( 9996) Unused argument (1) for <rnum>: 24137 :-P

Yeah there is the failed rnum damnit, in an error message in the MXP Messages window.

So this is broken, I cannot build a database using room numbers and room descs.

(Filed a BUG ingame about the unclosed RNum tag, but god knows when will they fix it.)

1.) How can I fetch/copy/packet-hack/whatever that damn broken rnum tag into a standard Mushclient variable, like mxp_roomnumber?

2.) How can I use GetEntity() for the working tags? print(GetEntity("Rname")) gives an empty line only.

3.) How can I list all the existing Entities with GetEntity()?

Regards.

Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts) bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #14 on Fri 18 Jun 2010 12:11 PM (UTC)

Message

Mymyc said:

<!ELEMENT RNum ATT="id" FLAG="RoomNum" EMPTY>

...

<RNum 24137><RName>River around Delos</RName>

Whoever did this hasn't been paying attention to the spec, which clearly said that an "empty" tag should be rendered as:


<RNum 24137 />

(Note the trailing "/>").

Or maybe as:


<RNum id=24137 />

All I can really suggest is to leave MXP turned off, and parse the "rnum" yourself in triggers. With luck they will always be at the start of a line.

Or, leave it turned on (to get stuff like RDesc) but in the OnPluginPacketReceived, detect the RNum tags, save the room number, and then remove them from the packet.

You could try sending a message to Achaea, with luck they will fix it up.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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