Add character limit to sketch name - Back end validation

[shinytang6]

Nature of issue?

• Found a bug
• Existing feature enhancement
• New feature request

Details about the bug:

name a project with special characters and try to donwload.
some of them will cause problem, e.g. &,|...

[catarak]

this is two things, right? 1. sketch names need a length limit (i don't know what an appropriate character limit is) and 2. sketch names need to be... url encoded? escaped somehow? not sure.

[himanshuc3]

@shinytang6 Can you provide an example. I tried a couple of them including &, | and when downloading the sketch, & is named and, | - or .

[shinytang6]

@himanshuc3 What you listed is the problem:)

[himanshuc3]

But what's the problem if the name of the file changes. It downloaded without any errors.

[shinytang6]

it doesn't matter with the content, should download the project in what you name.

[GaurangTandon]

@catarak Is anyone working on this issue? If not, then I'd like to take it up :) I plan to follow the advice given on this post for generating file names.

I plan to either:

1. generate file names based on the platform the user is using when they download the sketch (so same sketch can have different file names when downloaded on Windows/Linux) (also fall back to safer Windows naming when OS is not Windows/Mac/Linux)
2. generate safe cross platform file names (i.e. like Windows) every time for consistency's sake.

Would you suggest anything else? I prefer the second option. I can also display a toast message every time a restricted character is trimmed out from a file name, so user would not be immediately surprised.

[catarak]

i suggest the latter. i don't think it makes sense to change the sketch titles as they are in the editor, other than giving them a length limit; rather, i think the sketch titles should be escaped only when they are downloaded and translated to the name of a zip file, as this is the only time the sketch title affects this.

[GaurangTandon]

So I was going through the codebase and noticed that the relevant method is this:

p5.js-web-editor/client/modules/IDE/actions/project.js

Lines 181 to 184 in 244af16

	export function exportProjectAsZip(projectId) {
	const win = window.open(`${ROOT_URL}/projects/${projectId}/zip`, '_blank');
	win.focus();
	}

Note that it just opens a new window pointing to a resource that is probably already in the server. Where can I look at to edit the zip files file name?

[catarak]

The zip file is generated on the fly, so when a browser window requests that url, it generates the zip file. The entry point, server-side, is here: https://github.com/processing/p5.js-web-editor/blob/master/server/controllers/project.controller.js#L332

[GaurangTandon]

So, the problem here is that the first part of the file name (before the timestamp) is generated using slugify, which is too restrictive in what it allows. I noticed that even Chinese characters, which are perfectly valid in file names, are completely removed. Try 文字 as the sketch name for example.

I'll send in a PR.