[COUCHDB-1176] CouchDB accepts data which it cannot replicate (invalid UTF-8 json during replication)

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 1.0.1, 1.0.2

Environment

CentOS 5.5 64bit

• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jaakko Sipari
• Created: 23/May/11 13:30
• Updated: 02/Sep/18 06:33
• Resolved: 02/Sep/18 06:33

Description

CouchDB appears to treat some unicode characters as illegal when parsing escaped unicode values (\uXXXX) during insert or update of a document. These characters can however be inserted to the database by using the UTF-8 encoding instead of escaping. An example value would be an unicode value 0xFFFE which is escaped \uFFFE and as UTF-8 is represented by consecutive bytes with values 0xEF 0xBF and 0xBE.

Even though the documents are inserted using UTF-8 encoding without errors, couchdb always serves them in the escaped form. This leads us to the actual problem we currently have. If documents containing such unaccepted characters are inserted to couchdb by using UTF-8 encoding, attempt to replicate the database will abort to first of those documents giving an error like this:
{"error":"json_encode","reason":"{bad_term,{nocatch,{invalid_json,<<\"[{\\\"ok\\\":{\\\"_id\\\":\\\"192058c4f81afc66c5bf883548004331\\\",\\\"_rev\\\":\\\"1-ad1c9dcee520d12abdf948d91e31cf15\\\",\\\"abc\\\":\\\"\\\\ufffe\\\",\\\"_revisions\\\":

{\\\"start\\\":1,\\\"ids\\\":[\\\"ad1c9dcee520d12abdf948d91e31cf15\\\"]}

}}]\\n\">>}}}"}

Here are steps to reproduce:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/replicationtest_source
curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/replicationtest_target

1. Should fail
   curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -X POST -d @fffe_escaped.json http://localhost:5984/replicationtest_source
2. Should succeed
   curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -X POST -d @fffe_utf8.json http://localhost:5984/replicationtest_source
3. Should fail to json_encode error related to the previously inserted document
   curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -X POST -d " {\"source\":\"http://localhost:5984/replicationtest_source\",\"target\":\"replicationtest_target\"}

   " http://localhost:5984/_replicate

If anyone has a quick fix for this (how to accept "invalid" escaped unicode characters at least during replication), we would be more than happy to test it.