Re: Assert failure with ICU support

On Wed, 2023-04-19 at 18:30 +0800, Richard Guo wrote:
> I happened to run into an assert failure by chance with ICU support.
> Here is the query:
>
>     SELECT '1' SIMILAR TO '\൧';
>
> The failure happens in lexescape(),
>
>         default:
>             assert(iscalpha(c));
>             FAILW(REG_EESCAPE); /* unknown alphabetic escape */
>             break;
>
> Without ICU support, the same query just gives an error.
>
> # SELECT '1' SIMILAR TO '\൧';
> ERROR:  invalid regular expression: invalid escape \ sequence
>
> FWIW, I googled a bit and '൧' seems to be number 1 in Malayalam.

Thank you for the report and analysis! The problem exists all the way
back if you do:

SELECT '1' COLLATE "en-US-x-icu" SIMILAR TO '\൧';

The root cause (which you allude to) is that the code makes the
assumption that digits only include 0-9, but u_isdigit('൧') == true,
which violates that assumption.

For Linux[1] specifically, it seems that the assumption should hold for
iswdigit(). But looking here[2], it seems that the behavior of
iswdigit() depends on the locale and I don't think it's correct to make
that assumption.

I did some experimentation on ICU and I found (pseudocode -- the real
code needs to create a UChar32 from an encoded string first):

char name: MALAYALAM DIGIT ONE
u_isalnum('൧'): true
u_isalpha('൧'): false
u_isdigit('൧'): true
u_charType('൧') == U_DECIMAL_DIGIT_NUMBER: true
u_hasBinaryProperty('൧', UCHAR_POSIX_XDIGIT): true
u_hasBinaryProperty('൧', UCHAR_POSIX_ALNUM): true

The docs[3] for ICU say:

"There are also functions that provide easy migration from C/POSIX
functions like isblank(). Their use is generally discouraged because
the C/POSIX standards do not define their semantics beyond the ASCII
range, which means that different implementations exhibit very
different behavior. Instead, Unicode properties should be used
directly."

We should probably just check that it's plain ASCII.

Unfortunately I would not be surprised if there are more bugs similar
to this one.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/iswdigit.3.html
[2]
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/iswdigit.html
[3]
https://unicode-org.github.io/icu-docs/apidoc/dev/icu4c/uchar_8h.html#details