Regexps like "(.){0}...\1" drew an "invalid backreference number".
That's not unreasonable on its face, since the capture group will
never be matched if it's iterated zero times. However, other engines
such as Perl's don't complain about this, nor do we throw an error for
related cases such as "(.)|\1", even though that backref can never
succeed either. Also, if the zero-iterations case happens at runtime
rather than compile time --- say, "(x)*...\1" when there's no "x" to
be found --- that's not an error, we just deem the backref to not
match. Making this even less defensible, no error was thrown for
nested cases such as "((.)){0}...\2"; and to add insult to injury,
those cases could result in assertion failures instead. (It seems
that nothing especially bad happened in non-assert builds, though.)
Let's just fix it so that no error is thrown and instead the backref
is deemed to never match, so that compile-time detection of no
iterations behaves the same as run-time detection.
Per report from Mark Dilger. This appears to be an aboriginal error
in Spencer's library, so back-patch to all supported versions.
Pre-v14, it turns out to also be necessary to back-patch one aspect of
commits cb76fbd7e/00116dee5, namely to create capture-node subREs with
the begin/end states of their subexpressions, not the current lp/rp
of the outer parseqatom invocation. Otherwise delsub complains that
we're trying to disconnect a state from itself. This is a bit scary
but code examination shows that it's safe: in the pre-v14 code, if we
want to wrap iteration around the subexpression, the first thing we do
is overwrite the atom's begin/end fields with new states. So the
bogus values didn't survive long enough to be used for anything, except
if no iteration is required, in which case it doesn't matter.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/A099E4A8-4377-4C64-A98C-3DEDDC075502@enterprisedb.com
The recursion in cdissect() was careless about clearing match data
for capturing parentheses after rejecting a partial match. This
could allow a later back-reference to succeed when by rights it
should fail for lack of a defined referent.
To fix, think a little more rigorously about what the contract
between different levels of cdissect's recursion needs to be.
With the right spec, we can fix this using fewer rather than more
resets of the match data; the key decision being that a failed
sub-match is now explicitly responsible for clearing any matches
it may have set.
There are enough other cross-checks and optimizations in the code
that it's not especially easy to exhibit this problem; usually, the
match will fail as-expected. Plus, regexps that are even potentially
vulnerable are most likely user errors, since there's just not much
point in writing a back-ref that doesn't always have a referent.
These facts perhaps explain why the issue hasn't been detected,
even though it's almost certainly a couple of decades old.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/151435.1629733387@sss.pgh.pa.us
Commit cebc1d34e taught parseqatom() to optimize cases where a branch
contains only one, "messy", atom by getting rid of excess subRE nodes.
The way we really should do that is to keep the subRE built for the
"messy" child atom; but to avoid changing parseqatom's nominal API,
I made it delete that node after copying its fields to the outer subRE
made by parsebranch(). It seems that that actually worked at the time;
but it became dangerous after ea1268f63, because that later commit
allowed the lower invocation of parse() to return a subRE that was also
pointed to by some v->subs[] entry. This meant we could wind up with a
dangling pointer in v->subs[], allowing a later backref to misbehave,
but only if that subRE struct had been reused in between. So the damage
seems confined to cases like '((...))...(...\2'.
To fix, do what I should have done before and modify parseqatom's API
to make it possible for it to remove the caller's subRE instead of the
callee's. That's safer because we know that subRE isn't complete yet,
so noplace else will have a pointer to it.
Per report from Mark Dilger. Back-patch to v14 where the problematic
patches came in.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0203588E-E609-43AF-9F4F-902854231EE7@enterprisedb.com
POSIX defines the behavior of back-references thus:
The back-reference expression '\n' shall match the same (possibly
empty) string of characters as was matched by a subexpression
enclosed between "\(" and "\)" preceding the '\n'.
As far as I can see, the back-reference is supposed to consider only
the data characters matched by the referenced subexpression. However,
because our engine copies the NFA constructed from the referenced
subexpression, it effectively enforces any constraints therein, too.
As an example, '(^.)\1' ought to match 'xx', or any other string
starting with two occurrences of the same character; but in our code
it does not, and indeed can't match anything, because the '^' anchor
constraint is included in the backref's copied NFA. If POSIX intended
that, you'd think they'd mention it. Perl for one doesn't act that
way, so it's hard to conclude that this isn't a bug.
Fix by modifying the backref's NFA immediately after it's copied from
the reference, replacing all constraint arcs by EMPTY arcs so that the
constraints are treated as automatically satisfied. This still allows
us to enforce matching rules that depend only on the data characters;
for example, in '(^\d+).*\1' the NFA matching step will still know
that the backref can only match strings of digits.
Perhaps surprisingly, this change does not affect the results of any
of a rather large corpus of real-world regexes. Nonetheless, I would
not consider back-patching it, since it's a clear compatibility break.
Patch by me, reviewed by Joel Jacobson
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/661609.1614560029@sss.pgh.pa.us
Newline is certainly not a digit, nor a word character, so it is
sensible that it should match these complemented character classes.
Previously, \D and \W acted that way by default, but in
newline-sensitive mode ('n' or 'p' flag) they did not match newlines.
This behavior was previously forced because explicit complemented
character classes don't match newlines in newline-sensitive mode;
but as of the previous commit that implementation constraint no
longer exists. It seems useful to change this because the primary
real-world use for newline-sensitive mode seems to be to match the
default behavior of other regex engines such as Perl and Javascript
... and their default behavior is that these match newlines.
The old behavior can be kept by writing an explicit complemented
character class, i.e. [^[:digit:]] or [^[:word:]]. (This means
that \D and \W are not exactly equivalent to those strings, but
they weren't anyway.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3220564.1613859619@sss.pgh.pa.us
The complement-class escapes \D, \S, \W are now allowed within
bracket expressions. There is no semantic difficulty with doing
that, but the rather hokey macro-expansion-based implementation
previously used here couldn't cope.
Also, invent "word" as an allowed character class name, thus "\w"
is now equivalent to "[[:word:]]" outside brackets, or "[:word:]"
within brackets. POSIX allows such implementation-specific
extensions, and the same name is used in e.g. bash.
One surprising compatibility issue this raises is that constructs
such as "[\w-_]" are now disallowed, as our documentation has always
said they should be: character classes can't be endpoints of a range.
Previously, because \w was just a macro for "[:alnum:]_", such a
construct was read as "[[:alnum:]_-_]", so it was accepted so long as
the character after "-" was numerically greater than or equal to "_".
Some implementation cleanup along the way:
* Remove the lexnest() hack, and in consequence clean up wordchrs()
to not interact with the lexer.
* Fix colorcomplement() to not be O(N^2) in the number of colors
involved.
* Get rid of useless-as-far-as-I-can-see calls of element()
on single-character character element names in brackpart().
element() always maps these to the character itself, and things
would be quite broken if it didn't --- should "[a]" match something
different than "a" does? Besides, the shortcut path in brackpart()
wasn't doing this anyway, making it even more inconsistent.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2845172.1613674385@sss.pgh.pa.us
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3220564.1613859619@sss.pgh.pa.us
While poking at the regex code, I happened to notice that the bug
squashed in commit afcc8772e had a sibling: next() failed to return
a specific value associated with the '}' token for a "\{m,n\}"
quantifier when parsing in basic RE mode. Again, this could result
in treating the quantifier as non-greedy, which it never should be in
basic mode. For that to happen, the last character before "\}" that
sets "nextvalue" would have to set it to zero, or it'd have to have
accidentally been zero from the start. The failure can be provoked
repeatably with, for example, a bound ending in digit "0".
Like the previous patch, back-patch all the way.
Push some hopefully-uncontroversial bits extracted from an upcoming
patch series, to remove non-relevant clutter from the main patches.
In compact(), return immediately after setting REG_ASSERT error;
continuing the loop would just lead to assertion failure below.
(Ask me how I know.)
In parseqatom(), remove assertion that moresubs() did its job.
When moresubs actually did its job, this is redundant with that
function's final assert; but when it failed on OOM, this is an
assertion crash. We could avoid the crash by adding a NOERR()
check before the assertion, but it seems better to subtract code
than add it. (Note that there's a NOERR exit a few lines further
down, and nothing else between here and there requires moresubs
to have succeeded. So we don't really need an extra error exit.)
This is a live bug in assert-enabled builds, but given the very
low likelihood of OOM in moresub's tiny allocation, I don't think
it's worth back-patching.
On the other hand, it seems worthwhile to add an assertion that
our intended v->subs[subno] target is still null by the time we
are ready to insert into it, since there's a recursion in between.
In pg_regexec, ensure we fflush any debug output on the way out,
and try to make MDEBUG messages more uniform and helpful. (In
particular, ensure that all of them are prefixed with the subre's
id number, so one can match up entry and exit reports.)
Add some test cases in test_regex to improve coverage of lookahead
and lookbehind constraints. Adding these now is mainly to establish
that this is indeed the existing behavior.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1340281.1613018383@sss.pgh.pa.us
brenext(), when parsing a '*' quantifier, forgot to return any "value"
for the token; per the equivalent case in next(), it should return
value 1 to indicate that greedy rather than non-greedy behavior is
wanted. The result is that the compiled regexp could behave like 'x*?'
rather than the intended 'x*', if we were unlucky enough to have
a zero in v->nextvalue at this point. That seems to happen with some
reliability if we have '.*' at the beginning of a BRE-mode regexp,
although that depends on the initial contents of a stack-allocated
struct, so it's not guaranteed to fail.
Found by Alexander Lakhin using valgrind testing. This bug seems
to be aboriginal in Spencer's code, so back-patch all the way.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16814-6c5e3edd2bdf0d50@postgresql.org
This module provides a function test_regex() that is functionally
rather like regexp_matches(), but with additional debugging-oriented
options and additional output. The debug options are somewhat obscure;
they are chosen to match the API of the test harness that Henry Spencer
wrote way-back-when for use in Tcl. With this, we can import all the
test cases that Spencer wrote originally, even for regex functionality
that we don't currently expose in Postgres. This seems necessary
because we can no longer rely on Tcl to act as upstream and verify
any fixes or improvements that we make.
In addition to Spencer's tests, I added a few for lookbehind
constraints (which we added in 2015, and Tcl still hasn't absorbed)
that are modeled on his tests for lookahead constraints. After looking
at code coverage reports, I also threw in a couple of tests to more
fully exercise our "high colormap" logic.
According to my testing, this brings the check-world coverage
for src/backend/regex/ from 71.1% to 86.7% of lines.
(coverage.postgresql.org shows a slightly different number,
which I think is because it measures a non-assert build.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2873268.1609732164@sss.pgh.pa.us
