Invalid selector is causing unrecoverable error

[givankin]

Hi again Philip, it's been a while!

I am having the following situation and I wonder if you could give any advice here. It's possible that it's not your parser's responsibility but perhaps you could point to a way to work around this with your APIs.

So, one of the goals of our application when it comes to CSS parsing is to transform all the url()-s in it. We do so by using the CSSVisitor.visitCSSUrl() method.

However, when we have CSS like this:

body {
    background: url(../bg.png);
}
.#f { color: red; }

the parser fails unrecoverably on the .#f selector and so we're unable to transform the URLs. We're using v4.0.0 with CSS3 parser and .setBrowserCompliantMode(true) - which, as I imagined, shouldn't have treated such error as unrecoverable - as browser doesn't.

Sorry if my questions are noob - I am by no means a Java programmer. Thanks

[phax]

I will look at it after my vacation :)

[givankin]

Thanks! Have a great vacation : )

[phax]

The problem is the invalid selector. As you may know, there can be many selectors (e.g. .a,.b,.c) and I need to know how browsers handle this. Do they skip only the selector parts they cannot handle or the whole rule.
Basically the same problem as in subissue 3 of #17

[givankin]

@phax, according to Specs, the entire rule should be dropped. See https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#Conformance:

In the case of CSS, the entire rule in which the selector is used is dropped.

and https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/syndata.html#rule-sets:

...the whole statement should be ignored if there is an error anywhere in the selector...

[givankin]

I've also created a simple test and all browsers seem to comply with the specs: https://jsfiddle.net/aqdtzcac/1/ (tried Chrome, FF, IE 9/10/11, Safari on iOS and some androids as well).

[phax]

Thanks for the clarification. I'm working on a solution that works for you when you enable "browser compliant mode".

[givankin]

Thanks Philip, good to know =)
Will it work for invalid selectors only or more generally for any problem in rule parsing?

[phax]

For invalid selectors only. As the parser is grammar based I need to differentiate between recoverable and unrecoverable errors. Creating a completely lax parser is currently out of scope :)

[givankin]

@phax just so I know, do you have an estimate for the fix?

[phax]

within this week - but after 6 weeks of vacation there is plenty to do :)

[phax]

I have it locally working but been struggeling with some tests....

[phax]

Locally things are working. Please check with the latest SNAPSHOT

[givankin]

Hi Philip, it is working just fine! The only question is - if it is going to be released in 5.0 stream, it will be incompatible with Java 1.7, right? Any chance to include this into 4.0 stream? We can't drop support for Java 7 unfortunately now...

[givankin]

If necessary, we can contribute - under your guidance. We highly value your project and depend on it heavily, so we would be glad to do that.

[phax]

Well I already created a 4.1 backport and I think I can do the same for this fix.
Let me check tonight, if a 4.1.1 can be done with reasonable effort.
A donation link can be found at http://peppol.helger.com/public :)

[phax]

Release 4.1.1 is on its way to Maven central

[pmouawad]

@phax , it's not a big thing, but just to let you know I added a mention of you and your project in our changes.html#thanks section
: apache/jmeter@d607b3a

Apache JMeter 3.0 will be using your library.

[phax]

Thanks for the info and good luck for JMeter!! It's a great tool I'm also using!