Format of the message color issue

[kopr12]

There seems to be a problem with markup, I'm not sure where exactly is the problem, idea was to have separate colors for title and the body of the notification. I came up with this in the config file

format = "<b><span foreground='#fcaf3e'>%s</span></b>\n%b"

it works fine, however sometimes I did notice one problem with it but I didn't care enough to bother with it until now, problem is that in some cases title had the same color as the body, in this case white. Found out that if in the body of the message is the & symbol that would happen.

So, for example dunstify "Testing" "Example" works fine.
But dunstify "Testing" "Example & More" gives the problem described above.

Maybe it's escaping strings wrong or something like that, maybe there are more symbols like ampersand which would produce the same problem, I'm not sure, but I'm sure of this one.

Or maybe I'm doing something wrong with the format in the config file.

[tsipinakis]

The color issue is happening because, from dunsts perspective, you're sending an invalid notification, so the markup parsing fails and we fall back to stripping it off and displaying it in plain text as best as we can. (There should be an error in stdout)

If you have markup enabled in the config, it's the responsibility of the client to send us properly escaped text. The correct way to do this is, for example dunstify "Testing" "Example & More. This isn't done on dunstify (and notify-send) purposefully as one might want to send markup from the command line.

The notification spec is really vague about this, it specifies a few markup tags but no reference on escaping so dunst (and other clients) implicitly include HTMLs &char; character escape feature.

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I'll mark this as a bug because we can do some more smart parsing with &-escapes, hell a regex would work. But there are still areas that will make it fail, for example <, > characters will either result in the same error, or it will make the parser eat up parts of the text due to it being an invalid tag.

[kopr12]

I see, thanks for the explanation.

Until (and if) it lands in the dunst code I'll try to escape it in the code I'm using.

It's not a big thing but I thought I should report it anyway.

[tsipinakis]

If you do not care about markup in the summary/body of the notifications, setting markup = no in the config would resolve your issue without escaping it. (Obviously markup inside format still gets processed.)

[kopr12]

Resolved indeed, I had markup = full previously.

I'll leave closing of this issue to you then, since it's marked as a bug.

[kopr12]

Actually I had to go back to markup = full
It's better to have mentioned color problem but with escaping.