Sanitize markdown before sending if the adapter is hubot-telegram

[gburgett]

hubot help doesn't work with the Telegram adapter and a JS file containing this help header:

// Description:
//   Searches for query in wikia database. Looks in ingress subdomain by default. Set env var wikia_wiki to change subdomain.
//
//
// Configuration:
//   wikia_wiki
//
// Commands:
//   hubot wikia help - Returns a list of commands for this plugin
//   hubot wikia search [topic] <searchterm> - searches either on the ingress wikia or on a choosen wikia for the searchterm
//

Running hubot help produces this error

Bafplus 🇳🇱:
[Sat Jul 01 2017 14:13:01 GMT+0200 (CEST)] ERROR Error: Bad Request: can't parse entities in message text: Can't find end of the entity starting at byte offset 406
  at Function.TelegramBot.error (/home/server/hubot/node_modules/telegrambot/lib/telegrambot.js:26:15)
  at Request._callback (/home/server/hubot/node_modules/telegrambot/lib/telegrambot.js:47:66)
  at Request.self.callback (/home/server/hubot/node_modules/request/request.js:188:22)
  at emitTwo (events.js:106:13)
  at Request.emit (events.js:191:7)
  at Request.<anonymous> (/home/server/hubot/node_modules/request/request.js:1171:10)
  at emitOne (events.js:96:13)
  at Request.emit (events.js:188:7)
  at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (/home/server/hubot/node_modules/request/request.js:1091:12)
  at IncomingMessage.g (events.js:292:16)
  at emitNone (events.js:91:20)
  at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:185:7)
  at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:974:12)
  at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:80:11)
  at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:104:9)

[gburgett]

The text produced in the shell adapter, which appears to cause the problem, is this:

Bafplus 🇳🇱:
lada help
lada> Shell: I can do a lot of things!  Which would you like to know more about? You can say:

* lada help cycle-times - Calculate Speticycle times.
* lada help nickname - Set your nickname
* lada help res-wikia - Searches for query in wikia database. Looks in ingress subdomain by default. Set env var wikia_wiki to change subdomain.
* lada help google-images - A way to interact with the Google Images API.
* lada help auth - Assign roles to users and restrict command access in other scripts.


Or you can see all commands by typing lada help all.

[gburgett]

The issue is the mismatched underscore in the description. The telegram bot API refuses the message because it has a mismatched markdown element.

reproduce with:

curl -XPOST -H 'content-type: application/json' https://api.telegram.org/$TELEGRAM_TOKEN/sendMessage -d @/tmp/test.json

contents of /tmp/test.json should be

{ 
  "chat_id": 344335405,
  "text": "This unmatched_underscore breaks telegram markdown parsing",
  "reply_to_message_id": 8,
  "parse_mode": "Markdown"
}

[gburgett]

If Telegram doesn't change their API I'm going to have to add some kind of sanitizer to escape the descriptions and commands before sending them to the telegram adapter.