README.markdown

ANNOUNCEMENT

The development has moved on the official Panmind repository.

Follow either Panmind or watch the repository to catch up with developments :-).

Purpose of this fork

• Added support for instance variables
• Added support for symbolic links (;)
• Added support for links (@)

With these patches, you can unmarshal safely Rails' session cookies, even if they contain stuff in the Flash (the original upstream crashed when parsing a session with something in the Flash).

Tested with Ruby 1.9 marshalled data, with encodings attached to strings.

Have fun :-)

-vjt

Main

Most comprehensive guide to Ruby marshal you can find here:

http://spec.ruby-doc.org/wiki/Marshaling

or read C source in Ruby sources tree:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/doxygen/1.8.4/marshal_8c-source.html

Examples

Ruby:

cookie = {
  :user_id => 1024,
  :session_id => '56588901e819883d90fec315f4331bc2'
}

File.open('cookie.bin', 'w') do |f|
  f.write(Marshal.dump(cookie))
end

Erlang:

1> marshal:parse_file("cookie.bin").
[[{session_id,"56588901e819883d90fec315f4331bc2"},
  {user_id,1024}]]


% Extract User ID from Rails' session cookie
%
% generate_digest is in rcookie.erl
% unquote is in misultin (http://github.com/ostinelli/misultin)
% Sorry for the mess ;-)
%
extract_uid(CookieString) ->
  Cookies = mochiweb_cookies:parse_cookie(CookieString),
  case proplists:get_value(?SESSION_NAME, Cookies) of
    undefined -> false;

    SignedSession ->
      [Session, Signature] = string:tokens(unquote(SignedSession), "--"),

      case generate_digest(Session) == Signature of
        true ->
          [Data] = marshal:decode(base64:decode(Session)),
          Uid = proplists:get_value(user_id, Data),
          case Uid of
            undefined -> false;
            _         -> Uid
          end;

        _ -> false
      end
  end.