nulls in AppleTalk named entities, how badly do things break?

[cheesestraws]

As far as I can see there is nothing stopping zone names or NBP object/type names from containing \0s.

Has anyone tried this against real implementations of AppleTalk? How well (or badly) are such things dealt with?

This message brought to you by "ah, crap, I have to rewrite my ZIP table"

 

[mikes-macs]

I don't know, do you want me to rename an AppleTalk Router zone name to see and report back, is that a zero with a leading \ or just a zero?

 

[cheesestraws]

I mean, ASCII character 0, not a '0' or '\0'. Not even sure how you'd type it, so don't go out of your way to try it out :-D

Just wondering if anyone had any fun stories of breaking things.

My ZIP table for omnitalk now keeps track of pascal strings so now it won't barf on them - and has a unit test to make sure I don't break it later - but that was an annoying thing to do this evening

 

[joevt]

I don't know, do you want me to rename an AppleTalk Router zone name to see and report back, is that a zero with a leading \ or just a zero?

It's a null character, hex 0x00.

printf "MyAppleTalk\0Zone" > /tmp/myzonename.txt
xxd /tmp/myzonename.txt

00000000: 4d79 4170 706c 6554 616c 6b00 5a6f 6e65  MyAppleTalk.Zone

Can you copy a null character from a text file?