mattermost-community/focalboard

Bug: Invalid regular expression exception for emoji replacement in Firefox

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#4,121 opened on Nov 2, 2022

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 (2 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)TypeScript (26,187 stars) (2,542 forks)user submission
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Description

Steps to reproduce the behavior

  1. Go to the root path of the web server, i.e. localhost:8000
  2. See a blank page and an error.

Expected behavior

I see the welcome screen.

Edition and Platform

  • Edition: Personal Server
  • Version: 7.4.3
  • Browser and OS: Firefox 68, Ubuntu 20.04

Symptom

Loading the main page causes a syntax error while parsing the main.js bundle due to an illegal regular expression.

SyntaxError: invalid identity escape in regular expression

Root cause

This is due to an illegal regular expression escape used here:

https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/v7.4.3/webapp/src/blocks/boardView.ts#L62

Proposal

A code search suggests that sortBoardViewsAlphabetically is not meaningfully used in the codebase; it only has callsites in unit tests.

It seems that it was previously used in webapp/src/components/sidebar/sidebarBoardItem.tsx, however as of aa540e73ce669a1acd491a5edd7d55199ef1b87c, its use was decommissioned and the original utility was not removed.

Removing this function altogether remediates the SyntaxError issue in my local environment. I propose this method and associated unit tests simply be removed.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
frontend
Issue type
bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
1
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
under 1 hour
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
TypeScript basicsGitHub workflow
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
90
Research direction
The issue is a bug caused by an invalid regex escape in the function `sortBoardViewsAlphabetically` in `webapp/src/blocks/boardView.ts` at line 62. The function is no longer used except in its own unit tests. The fix is to remove the function and its associated tests. The repository is Focalboard, a TypeScript project. The issue has no assignees or PRs, making it available for first time contributors.