[pve-devel] [PATCH ha-manager] rules: fix utf-8 encoding and decoding for comments field

[Daniel Kral]

On Wed Oct 22, 2025 at 2:58 PM CEST, Fiona Ebner wrote:
> Am 05.09.25 um 12:17 PM schrieb Daniel Kral:
>> As reported by a user in the community forum [0].
>> 
>> [0] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/169258/page-14#post-792521
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Daniel Kral <d.kral at proxmox.com>
>> ---
>> Tested a few strings from an unicode example page [1], including at
>> least a mix of ASCII, Latin-1, Cyrillic and Bengali characters.
>> 
>> Also checked this applies both on master and on another ha-manager
>> series [2] without any fuzz.
>> 
>> [1] https://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/unicode-sample.html
>> [2] https://lore.proxmox.com/pve-devel/20250821143705.256562-1-d.kral@proxmox.com/
>> 
>>  src/PVE/HA/Rules.pm | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++----
>>  1 file changed, 24 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>> 
>> diff --git a/src/PVE/HA/Rules.pm b/src/PVE/HA/Rules.pm
>> index 323ad038..8c60b5ce 100644
>> --- a/src/PVE/HA/Rules.pm
>> +++ b/src/PVE/HA/Rules.pm
>> @@ -163,8 +163,6 @@ sub decode_value {
>>          }
>>  
>>          return $res;
>> -    } elsif ($key eq 'comment') {
>> -        return PVE::Tools::decode_text($value);
>>      }
>>  
>>      my $plugin = $class->lookup($type);
>> @@ -198,8 +196,6 @@ sub encode_value {
>>          PVE::HA::Tools::pve_verify_ha_resource_id($_) for keys %$value;
>>  
>>          return join(',', sort keys %$value);
>> -    } elsif ($key eq 'comment') {
>> -        return PVE::Tools::encode_text($value);
>>      }
>>  
>>      my $plugin = $class->lookup($type);
>
> Why did the original implementation with {de,en}code_value() not work?
>

Sorry for the late reply, I had to look into it a bit: It seems with the
{de,en}code_text($value) in {de,en}code_value(...) from above, we decode
the comment text twice and then encode it to store it.

I haven't found where it is done exactly/not sure about it, but it seems
that we already unescape+utf8-decode text somewhere else for the API
arguments (maybe AnyEvent::Http or some other handler?) before that, but
maybe someone more knowledgeable about pve-http-server could answer
here. The following script tries to capture what happens with the value:

```
#!/usr/bin/env perl

use v5.36;

use Encode;
use URI::Escape;
use Data::Dumper;

sub encode_text {
    my ($text) = @_;

    # all control and hi-bit characters, ':' and '%'
    my $unsafe = "^\x20-\x24\x26-\x39\x3b-\x7e";
    return uri_escape(Encode::encode("utf8", $text), $unsafe);
}

sub decode_text {
    my ($data) = @_;

    return Encode::decode("utf8", uri_unescape($data));
}

my $input = 'à á â ã ä å';

print "Original: $input\n";
print "Decode: " . ($input = decode_text($input)) . "\n";
print "2*Decode: " . ($input = decode_text($input)) . "\n";
print "2*Decode+Encode: " . ($input = encode_text($input)) . "\n";
```

With the following output:

```
# ./decode-encode.pl
Original: à á â ã ä å
Decode:
Wide character in print at ./decode-encode.pl line 27.
2*Decode: � � � � � �
2*Decode+Encode: %EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD %EF%BF%BD
```

which is exactly what is stored in the rules.cfg afterwards.