[pmwiki-users] FYI: htpasswd/htgroup and spaces in user/group ids

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 11:23:22AM +0200, Dominique Faure wrote:
> Remembering your response [1] to the space in user ids problem, I was
> wondering how Apache was handling that.
> 
> Digging in the source code[2-3], I found that:
> * The group and user names handled by Apache may be defined with the
> regexp: /[^:]+/ (aka any char except two-colons which acts as field
> separator).
> * The group definition itself handles this by allowing userids to be
> space separated words or (single ou double) quoted strings (containing
> eventually backslash-escaped quotes). BTW, this is not clearly stated
> (nor documented) whereas commas are allowed or not as separator.

I was basing my implementation based on the Apache documentation,
and you're correct that it doesn't say anything about userids
being single or double quoted strings.  But since quoted strings
are allowed just about anywhere in an Apache config file, perhaps
they didn't feel that they needed to call it out specially.

At any rate, this makes me feel much better about making
AuthUser handle spaces in usernames and group names (which I
really want for LDAP/AD authentication), so I'll do that as 
part of the 2.2 beta.

Thanks for checking into this for me, I really appreciate it.

Pm