On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 08:23:37AM +0100, Martin Ågren wrote: > When we parse a padding directive ("%<" or "%>"), we might populate a > few of the struct's fields before bailing. This can result in such > half-parsed information being used to actually introduce some > padding/truncation. > > When parsing a "%<" or "%>", only store the parsed data after parsing > successfully. The added test would have failed before this commit. It > also shows how the existing behavior is hardly something someone can > rely on since the non-consumed modifier ("%<(10,bad)") shows up verbatim > in the pretty output. Ideally I'd expect us to die when seeing misformatted placeholders like this. This is way less confusing to the user as otherwise things _look_ like they work, but we silently do the wrong thing. That being said, I have no idea whether we can do such a change now without breaking existing usecases. As you rightfully argue the result already is wrong, but with my proposal we'd completely refuse to do anything. Which I'd argue is a good thing in the end. > We could let the caller use a temporary struct and only copy the data on > success. Let's instead make our parsing function easy to use correctly > by letting it only touch the output struct in the success case. s/success/&ful/ > While setting up a temporary struct for parsing into, we might as well > initialize it to a well-defined state. It's unnecessary for the current > implementation since it always writes to all three fields in a > successful case, but some future-proofing shouldn't hurt. > > Note that the test relies on first using a correct placeholder > "%<(4,trunc)" where "trunc" (`trunc_right`) lingers in our struct until > it's then used instead of the invalid "bad". The next commit will teach > us to clean up any remnants of "%<(4,trunc)" after handling it. > > Signed-off-by: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@xxxxxxxxx> > --- > pretty.c | 18 ++++++++++++------ > t/t4205-log-pretty-formats.sh | 6 ++++++ > 2 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/pretty.c b/pretty.c > index e5e8ef24fa..a4fa052f8b 100644 > --- a/pretty.c > +++ b/pretty.c > @@ -1121,6 +1121,11 @@ static size_t parse_padding_placeholder(const char *placeholder, > const char *ch = placeholder; > enum flush_type flush_type; > int to_column = 0; > + struct padding_args ans = { > + .flush_type = no_flush, > + .truncate = trunc_none, > + .padding = 0, > + }; > > switch (*ch++) { > case '<': I honestly have no idea what `ans` stands for. You could call it `result` to signify that it's what we'll ultimately bubble up to the caller in the successful case. Patrick