'5f' is being appended after the underscore in the user-ids.

Here are the details of my Foswiki installation-

Server - Apache 2.2.9
OS - Windows 2003 Server Edition
Foswiki - 1.0.7
Strawberry Perl 5.10

For authentication, I am using the mod_auth_sspi module of Apache in order to authenticate against the Active Directory in my intranet. However, the user ids have a 5f appended to them after the underscore; for eg. if the user id is Guruprasad_Iyer then it gets displayed as- Guruprasad_5fIyer

I realise that 5f is the hex representation for the underscore character. My friend tells me this has something to do with safe encoding. Can somedoby help here?

Does this have anything to do with this

-- GuruprasadIyer - 03 Sep 2009

Can anybody help here?

-- GuruprasadIyer - 24 Sep 2009

You don't say where user id's have the 5f's that is bothering you.

Foswiki has (potentially) three representations of a user. These are:

The login id - e.g. the_user (if and only if you have enabled login ids in registration)
The wiki name - e.g. TheUser
The canonical user identifier - e.g. the_5fuser

The login is passed to the login manager in order to log in. The login manager maps it to a canonical user id, which Foswiki uses internally to identify the user. The canonical user id is used to find the wiki name, and regenerate the login name. If login ids are not enabled, then the wiki name is used to identify the user.

The idea is that the canonical user id is never seen by an end user of Foswiki. Normally only the wiki name is seen. if the login manager and user mapper are working correctly. However it sounds like you are seeing the canonical user id somewhere, which should never happen. To advise further, we would need to know exactly where you are seeing it.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 10 Oct 2009

Hi Crawford, the 5f is both seen on breadcrumb line, and when we use $wikiname. for example I write below codes in WebHome to display the most recent changes using formatted search:

%SEARCH{ web="%WEB%" search="\.*" scope="topic" excludetopic="Web*" regex="on" nosearch="on" nototal="on" order="modified" reverse="on" limit="10" header="" format="---+++++[[$percntSPACEOUT{$topic}$percnt]] $n $wikiname $date <br> $summary [[$topic][See more...]] <br> " }%

-- CoriaXu - 10 Oct 2009

As Coria says, the 5f is added to the username wherever $wikiusername or $wikiname is used. In fact, if I look at the correspondint txt,v files then the usernames are recorded along with '5f'

-- GuruprasadIyer - 14 Oct 2009

I suppose this is related to Item1936

-- GuruprasadIyer - 21 Oct 2009

Here is what I have done. I modified the Render.pm file and added this line

$wn =~ s/5f//;

to the renderRevisionInfo function. I also changed this line

$value =~ s/\$wikiusername/$wun/gi;

to use $wn instead of $wun. I hope this does not break anything else.

-- GuruprasadIyer - 21 Oct 2009

It probably is related to Item1936, yes. However I would strongly recommend against that workaround, as it only treats the symptom, not the cause (as I am sure you are aware). It won't break anything, as long as you only have users with alphanumerics and underscores, and not any other characters, in their names.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 21 Oct 2009

Thanks for your comment CrawfordCurrie. However, what is the alternative? Can I do anything better?

-- GuruprasadIyer - 21 Oct 2009

fascinating (and frustrating for you :/) - I'll make a unit test as play with this - if we're all lucky (and in my case that's getting enough free time) I'll have a resolution for the 1.0.8 release we're looking towards for the next weeks.

-- SvenDowideit - 21 Oct 2009

I've added a fix - which will be in 1.0.8 - see Tasks.Item2316.

-- SvenDowideit - 01 Nov 2009

Thanks Sven!

-- GuruprasadIyer - 01 Dec 2009