I just realized there is no email system so I put this on the base. Rfay found an issue in the email system and we are not sure if this is a bug in the email system or intended behavior. When sending a plain text message including the '<' character, the body is truncated at this character by the drupal_html_to_text() function, even if the body is not html.

I'm writing the issue from my poor understanding of the email system, so I'll ask some questions I can't reply myself.

1st - The format() method of the DefaultMailSystem class (modules/system/mail.sending.inc) forces the conversion of the message body from html to text. Should this happen for plain text emails also?

2nd - the function drupal_html_to_text() should remove a bogus html tag when it is not closed?

These two concerns combined break the tests of the email_example module when trying to send a message with the character '<' followed by arbitrary characters of well known html tags in a random body.

Basically what is happening is that the following call on plain text body:

drupal_html_to_text(" this simple check, if(a<b) should fail");

returns the string "this simple check, if(a*"

Comments

rfay’s picture

rfay
he,him
Primary language English
Location Palisade, CO, USA
commented

Good detective work - thanks for tracking this down, ilo.

This seems like a fundamental "wrong" with emails, since it inexplicably would throw away the remainder of an email body where the user used the < character for any reason.

sun’s picture

sun
Primary language German
Location Karlsruhe
commented

All e-mail messages are now considered to be HTML.

Plain-text messages should follow this flow:

// hook_mail():
$body = check_plain(" this simple check, if(a<b) should fail");

// elsewhere in the mail system (the mail sending system)
drupal_html_to_text($body);
ilo’s picture

ilo commented

Thanks sun for your attention.

In an attempt to document this 'requirement' (for the D6 to D7 upgrade handbook, and the email example module) I can't find any issue about that, so don't know where to point about that.

Is this string " < b " (without spaces) considered an invalid html tag? or the function drupal_html_to_text is not working as expected with tags not closed properly?

Edited: the " < b " string just truncated the next sentence in the comment (I thought it was only happening in the email system..). It is a copy of the previous one but removing the spaces between < and b.

On the other hand.. is the "

rfay’s picture

rfay
he,him
Primary language English
Location Palisade, CO, USA
commented

@ilo, there's great irony that your post was truncated with the introduction of a <. You probably have to return and finish it :-)

ilo’s picture

ilo commented

@rfay, I edited, and posted the line with a fix and without it to be kept as demonstration :)

rfay’s picture

rfay
he,him
Primary language English
Location Palisade, CO, USA
commented

@sun (#2) So you're saying this is a behavior change for D7? I don't see anything on the module update page about this, but I'll be happy to add it. Is the basic information you put in #2 adequate for this, or is there a broader context?

rfay’s picture

rfay
he,him
Primary language English
Location Palisade, CO, USA
commented
Assigned: Unassigned » rfay

I'll document this per sun's statement in #2. @sun, are there any other email changes in behavior that go with this? Can you point me to an issue where it was discussed?

rfay’s picture

rfay
he,him
Primary language English
Location Palisade, CO, USA
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Sun beat me to this in http://drupal.org/node/727352. I added a little bit to it. @sun you may want to review.

Followup on the Email Example at #730984: Email example (D7) needs to check_plain on user text

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.