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Re: [PATCH 2/4] parse: add functions for parsing from non-string buffers

From
PWPhillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date
Dec 5, 2025, 16:11 UTC
Message-ID
<4d83375b-76e2-4420-80dd-6a04d3201532@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To
<20251130131537.GB199335@coredump.intra.peff.net>
On 30/11/2025 13:15, Jeff King wrote:
Show 46 quoted lines
> If you have a buffer that is not NUL-terminated but want to parse an
> integer, there aren't many good options. If you use strtol() and
> friends, you risk running off the end of the buffer if there is no
> non-digit terminating character. And even if you carefully make sure
> that there is such a character, ASan's strict-string-check mode will
> still complain.
> 
> You can copy bytes into a temporary buffer, terminate it, and then call
> strtol(), but doing so adds some pitfalls (like making sure you soak up
> whitespace and leading +/- signs, and reporting overflow for overly long
> input). Or you can hand-parse the digits, but then you need to take some
> care to handle overflow (and again, whitespace and +/- signs).
> 
> These things aren't impossible to do right, but it's error-prone to have
> to do them in every spot that wants to do such parsing. So let's add
> some functions which can be used across the code base.
> 
> There are a few choices regarding the interface and the implementation.
> 
> First, the implementation:
> 
>    - I went with with parsing the digits (rather than buffering and
>      passing to libc functions). It ends up being a similar amount of
>      code because we have to do some parsing either way. And likewise
>      overflow detection depends on the exact type the caller wants, so we
>      either have to do it by hand or write a separate wrapper for
>      strtol(), strtoumax(), and so on.
> 
>    - Unsigned overflow detection is done using the same techniques as in
>      unsigned_add_overflows(), etc. We can't use those macros directly
>      because our core function is type-agnostic (so the caller passes in
>      the max value, rather than us deriving it on the fly). This is
>      similar to how git_parse_int(), etc, work.
> 
>    - Signed overflow detection assumes that we can express a negative
>      value with magnitude one larger than our maximum positive value
>      (e.g., -128..127 for a signed 8-bit value). I doubt this is
>      guaranteed by the standard, but it should hold in practice, and we
>      make the same assumption in git_parse_int(), etc. The nice thing
>      about this is that we can derive the range from the number of bits
>      in the type. For ints, you obviously could use INT_MIN..INT_MAX, but
>      for an arbitrary type, we can use maximum_signed_value_of_type().
> 
>    - I didn't bother with handling bases other than 10. It would
>      complicate the code, and I suspect it won't be needed. We could
>      probably retro-fit it later without too much work, if need be.
This all sounds sensible to me and an does the interface description.
Show 21 quoted lines
> +bool parse_unsigned_from_buf(const char *buf, size_t len, const char **ep,
> +			     uintmax_t *ret, uintmax_t max)
> +{
> +	return parse_from_buf_internal(buf, len, ep, NULL, ret, max);
> +}
> +
> +bool parse_signed_from_buf(const char *buf, size_t len, const char **ep,
> +			   intmax_t *ret, intmax_t max)
> +{
> +	uintmax_t u_ret;
> +	bool negate;
> +
> +	if (!parse_from_buf_internal(buf, len, ep, &negate, &u_ret, max))
> +		return false;
> +	/*
> +	 * Range already checked internally, but we must apply negation
> +	 * ourselves since only we have the signed integer type.
> +	 */
> +	if (negate) {
> +		*ret = u_ret;
> +		*ret = -*ret;

If we're parsing INTMAX_MIN then this negation tries to calculate -INTMAX_MIN which is undefined (I've added some tests for parsing INTMAX_MAX and INTMAX_MIN at [1] and verified that UBSAN is triggered when parsing INTMAX_MIN). We could do

		*ret = u_ret;
		if (*ret != INTMAX_MIN)
			*ret = -*ret;

but I think it might be easier to alter parse_from_buf_internal() to make "negate" a local variable, change the function argument to "bool allow_negative" and do

		*ret = negate ? 0u - val : val;

Then parse_signed_from_buf() can do "*ret = *u_ret;" to convert the output of parse_from_buf_internal() to a signed value.

Show 15 quoted lines
> diff --git a/t/unit-tests/u-parse-int.c b/t/unit-tests/u-parse-int.c
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000000..a1601bb16b
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/t/unit-tests/u-parse-int.c
> @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
> +#include "unit-test.h"
> +#include "parse.h"
> +
> +static void check_int(const char *buf, size_t len,
> +		      size_t expect_ep_ofs, int expect_errno,
> +		      int expect_result)
> +{
> +	const char *ep;
> +	int result;

Do we want to set errno=0 here so that we can be sure it has been set by parse_int_from_buf() when we check it below?

Thanks
Phillip

[1] https://github.com/phillipwood/git/commit/e061e3e640db01d4fcf54d265d33352235151973

Show 89 quoted lines
> +	bool ok = parse_int_from_buf(buf, len, &ep, &result);
> +
> +	if (expect_errno) {
> +		cl_assert(!ok);
> +		cl_assert_equal_i(expect_errno, errno);
> +		return;
> +	}
> +
> +	cl_assert(ok);
> +	cl_assert_equal_i(expect_result, result);
> +	cl_assert_equal_i(expect_ep_ofs, ep - buf);
> +}
> +
> +static void check_int_str(const char *buf, size_t ofs, int err, int res)
> +{
> +	check_int(buf, strlen(buf), ofs, err, res);
> +}
> +
> +static void check_int_full(const char *buf, int res)
> +{
> +	check_int_str(buf, strlen(buf), 0, res);
> +}
> +
> +static void check_int_err(const char *buf, int err)
> +{
> +	check_int(buf, strlen(buf), 0, err, 0);
> +}
> +
> +void test_parse_int__basic(void)
> +{
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("0", 0));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("11", 11));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("-23", -23));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("+23", 23));
> +
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_str("  31337  ", 7, 0, 31337));
> +
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_err("  garbage", EINVAL));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_err("", EINVAL));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_err("-", EINVAL));
> +
> +	cl_invoke(check_int("123", 2, 2, 0, 12));
> +}
> +
> +void test_parse_int__range(void)
> +{
> +	/*
> +	 * These assume a 32-bit int. We could avoid that with some
> +	 * conditionals, but it's probably better for the test to
> +	 * fail noisily and we can decide how to handle it then.
> +	 */
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("2147483647", 2147483647));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_err("2147483648", ERANGE));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("-2147483647", -2147483647));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_full("-2147483648", -2147483648));
> +	cl_invoke(check_int_err("-2147483649", ERANGE));
> +}
> +
> +static void check_unsigned(const char *buf, uintmax_t max,
> +			   int expect_errno, uintmax_t expect_result)
> +{
> +	const char *ep;
> +	uintmax_t result;
> +	bool ok = parse_unsigned_from_buf(buf, strlen(buf), &ep, &result, max);
> +
> +	if (expect_errno) {
> +		cl_assert(!ok);
> +		cl_assert_equal_i(expect_errno, errno);
> +		return;
> +	}
> +
> +	cl_assert(ok);
> +	cl_assert_equal_s(ep, "");
> +	/*
> +	 * Do not use cl_assert_equal_i_fmt(..., PRIuMAX) here. The macro
> +	 * casts to int under the hood, corrupting the values.
> +	 */
> +	clar__assert_equal(CLAR_CURRENT_FILE, CLAR_CURRENT_FUNC,
> +			   CLAR_CURRENT_LINE,
> +			   "expect_result != result", 1,
> +			   "%"PRIuMAX, expect_result, result);
> +}
> +
> +void test_parse_int__unsigned(void)
> +{
> +	cl_invoke(check_unsigned("4294967295", UINT_MAX, 0, 4294967295U));
> +	cl_invoke(check_unsigned("1053", 1000, ERANGE, 0));
> +	cl_invoke(check_unsigned("-17", UINT_MAX, EINVAL, 0));
> +}
Previous: Patrick SteinhardtNext: Junio C Hamano
Message 54 of 64 in “asan bonanza”
  1. 0/9 asan bonanzaJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  2. 1/9 compat/mmap: mark unused argument in git_munmap()Jeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  3. 2/9 pack-bitmap: handle name-hash lookups in incremental bitmapsJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  4. Patrick SteinhardtNov 12, 2025
  5. Taylor BlauNov 13, 2025
  6. Jeff KingNov 18, 2025
  7. 3/9 Makefile: turn on NO_MMAP when building with ASanJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  8. Collin FunkNov 12, 2025
  9. Jeff KingNov 12, 2025
  10. Collin FunkNov 12, 2025
  11. Patrick SteinhardtNov 12, 2025
  12. Taylor BlauNov 13, 2025
  13. Patrick SteinhardtNov 13, 2025
  14. Jeff KingNov 18, 2025
  15. Junio C HamanoNov 13, 2025
  16. Patrick SteinhardtNov 14, 2025
  17. Jeff KingNov 15, 2025
  18. 4/9 cache-tree: avoid strtol() on non-string bufferJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  19. Patrick SteinhardtNov 12, 2025
  20. Taylor BlauNov 13, 2025
  21. Jeff KingNov 18, 2025
  22. Jeff KingNov 18, 2025
  23. 5/9 fsck: assert newline presence in fsck_ident()Jeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  24. 6/9 fsck: avoid strcspn() in fsck_ident()Jeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  25. 7/9 fsck: remove redundant date timestamp checkJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  26. 8/9 fsck: avoid parse_timestamp() on buffer that isn't NUL-terminatedJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  27. Patrick SteinhardtNov 12, 2025
  28. Junio C HamanoNov 12, 2025
  29. Jeff KingNov 15, 2025
  30. 9/9 t: enable ASan's strict_string_checks optionJeff King, Nov 12, 2025
  31. Taylor BlauNov 13, 2025
  32. 0/9 asan bonanzaJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  33. 1/9 compat/mmap: mark unused argument in git_munmap()Jeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  34. 2/9 pack-bitmap: handle name-hash lookups in incremental bitmapsJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  35. 3/9 Makefile: turn on NO_MMAP when building with ASanJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  36. 4/9 cache-tree: avoid strtol() on non-string bufferJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  37. Phillip WoodNov 18, 2025
  38. Junio C HamanoNov 23, 2025
  39. Phillip WoodNov 23, 2025
  40. Junio C HamanoNov 23, 2025
  41. Jeff KingNov 24, 2025
  42. Junio C HamanoNov 24, 2025
  43. Jeff KingNov 26, 2025
  44. Junio C HamanoNov 26, 2025
  45. 0/4 more robust functions for parsing int from bufJeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  46. 1/4 parse: prefer bool to int for boolean returnsJeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  47. Patrick SteinhardtDec 4, 2025
  48. 2/4 parse: add functions for parsing from non-string buffersJeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  49. my complaints with clarJeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  50. Phillip WoodDec 1, 2025
  51. Patrick SteinhardtDec 4, 2025
  52. Jeff KingDec 5, 2025
  53. Patrick SteinhardtDec 4, 2025
  54. Phillip WoodDec 5, 2025
  55. Junio C HamanoJan 20, 2026
  56. Jeff KingJan 21, 2026
  57. 3/4 cache-tree: use parse_int_from_buf()Jeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  58. 4/4 fsck: use parse_unsigned_from_buf() for parsing timestampJeff King, Nov 30, 2025
  59. 5/9 fsck: assert newline presence in fsck_ident()Jeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  60. 6/9 fsck: avoid strcspn() in fsck_ident()Jeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  61. 7/9 fsck: remove redundant date timestamp checkJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  62. 8/9 fsck: avoid parse_timestamp() on buffer that isn't NUL-terminatedJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  63. 9/9 t: enable ASan's strict_string_checks optionJeff King, Nov 18, 2025
  64. Junio C HamanoNov 23, 2025

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