Problem with probably malformed gophermap

[redterminal-org]

Hi @davep,

there is a problem with the link gopher://midnight.pub/1/, which probably sends a malformed gophermap and rogallo stops with an error message (missing <TAB> in "i" type line).

If rogallo can't parse or fix such things, it should catch the error and output an error message without aborting completely. There are probably more sites with such gophermaps, which don't have a <TAB> and the rest of a normal "i" type line, so you should investigate, and if possible, "repair" such malformed gophermaps.

Keep up your wonderful work,
-fab-

[davep]

Yup, looks like there's a lot of i lines without any tabs:

$ port70 gopher://midnight.pub/1/ | sed 's/\t/[TAB]/g' | head -30
i .----. |:: :::|__.-'.. . .'-. | .: :  | _.-
i |:. '| |.:: .:|  |  || : . :| | : ::: | | '
i |.-----------+++----------------------. |
i.'             |           ( >)         '.
i-------------------------------------------
i___      ___     .'The'.     ___      ___ |
i|+|      |+|   MidnightPub   |+|      |+| |
i___   (  ___     `.___.'     ___      ___ |
i|+| ) () |+|      !L||       |+|      |+| |
i___/====\______--.!L||_|--_.--._--|\\-._.--.
i   '    '@    /_/\     !--.:==: \--||--\`:=:
i..-....-.@ @          @@ @....-....-....-...
i  I    I@|/            `Y@    I    I_.-.I
i        \_/            \_/       o=',,-,,`=-
i--------------------------------------------
i[TAB][TAB]null.host[TAB]1
iIt's late. You are seconds away from the main street in a small
ialley. It's quieter here, but you can still hear the sound of
ichatter, footsteps, and cars from busy downtown. The city is
ibuzzing, the streets are like arteries. You see an intriguing place
iin the alley, with a moon on its door. It reads "The Midnight Pub".
i[TAB][TAB]null.host[TAB]1
iThe Midnight is a virtual pub that lets you write posts and create
ipages. To join, send an email to m15o@posteo.net
i[TAB][TAB]null.host[TAB]1
02026-07-27 orna_de_brume - Ici dans le Nord[TAB]/posts/2846[TAB]midnight.pub[TAB]70
02026-07-23 turboblack - just finished my Gopher Hole[TAB]/posts/2845[TAB]midnight.pub[TAB]70
02026-07-20 fallenriver - junk[TAB]/posts/2844[TAB]midnight.pub[TAB]70
02026-07-07 fallenriver - sail[TAB]/posts/2843[TAB]midnight.pub[TAB]70
02026-07-05 rrr - On the question of sobbing uncontrollably in dreams[TAB]/posts/2842[TAB]midnight.pub[TAB]70

I guess this is where I start rolling back being fairly strict about this stuff. ;-)

[davep]

Raised davep/gophermap#6

[davep]

Will be fixed via davep/gophermap#7

[davep]

Fun fact: looks like Lagrange just plain ignores those i lines that have no tabs.

[redterminal-org]

Yes, it's not nice that you can't count on gopher server responses, and I believe its breaking with Gophers unwritten rules, but after all, they're rules not laws. And because it's such a seemingly simple protocol, there are also a lot of server implemetations, like this one.

And some people might create their gophermaps manually, which is also error prone.

So I would suggest, if your parser can't parse a real link line and make a functioning link from it, it should also ignore it, or better, print some information about that fact on the link line in question.

[davep]

I've taken the approach of, if all else fails, fall back to treating lines that seem malformed as i lines. I suspect that will work well in most cases. If you see any others that are problematic do let me know!

[davep]

The GopherMap v0.2.0 library fixes this, so if you can update the dependencies of Rogallo (uv tool upgrade --all if you installed with uv, for example) this should work right now:

I'll also make an update to Rogallo later on that bumps the minimum-required GopherMap library.