Properly escape task title

[mrossinek]

Description

I am a little bit unsure on how to report this issue since it is a very specific problem that is unlikely to pop up for anyone else.

I am having problems with this specific issue: GothenburgBitFactory/taskwarrior#2193

As you can see, it includes several keywords which taskwarrior reacts to and I thus observe the following error in my log every time bugwarrior-pull is run:

INFO:bugwarrior.db:Adding task depends filter does not work with IDs [#2193 issue]
ERROR:bugwarrior.db:Unable to add task: b'Configuration override rc.json.array:TRUE\nConfiguration override rc.verbose:new-uuid\nConfiguration override rc.confirmation:no\nConfiguration override rc.dependency.confirmation:no\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabtitle.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabtitle.label:"Gitlab Title"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabdescription.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabdescription.label:"Gitlab Description"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabcreatedon.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabcreatedon.label:"Gitlab Created"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabupdatedat.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabupdatedat.label:"Gitlab Updated"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabduedate.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabduedate.label:"Gitlab Due Date"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabmilestone.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabmilestone.label:"Gitlab Milestone"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlaburl.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlaburl.label:"Gitlab URL"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabrepo.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabrepo.label:"Gitlab Repo Slug"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabtype.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabtype.label:"Gitlab Type"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabnumber.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabnumber.label:"Gitlab Issue/MR #"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabstate.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabstate.label:"Gitlab Issue/MR State"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabupvotes.type:numeric\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabupvotes.label:"Gitlab Upvotes"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabdownvotes.type:numeric\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabdownvotes.label:"Gitlab Downvotes"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabwip.type:numeric\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabwip.label:"Gitlab MR Work-In-Progress Flag"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabauthor.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabauthor.label:"Gitlab Author"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabassignee.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabassignee.label:"Gitlab Assignee"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabnamespace.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabnamespace.label:"Gitlab Namespace"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabweight.type:numeric\nConfiguration override rc.uda.gitlabweight.label:"Gitlab Weight"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubtitle.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubtitle.label:"Github Title"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubbody.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubbody.label:"Github Body"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubcreatedon.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubcreatedon.label:"Github Created"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubupdatedat.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubupdatedat.label:"Github Updated"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubclosedon.type:date\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubclosedon.label:"GitHub Closed"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubmilestone.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubmilestone.label:"Github Milestone"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubrepo.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubrepo.label:"Github Repo Slug"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githuburl.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githuburl.label:"Github URL"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubtype.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubtype.label:"Github Type"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubnumber.type:numeric\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubnumber.label:"Github Issue/PR #"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubuser.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubuser.label:"Github User"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubnamespace.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubnamespace.label:"Github Namespace"\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubstate.type:string\nConfiguration override rc.uda.githubstate.label:"GitHub State"\nThe expression could not be evaluated.'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/bugwarrior/db.py", line 422, in synchronize
    new_task = tw.task_add(**issue)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/taskw/warrior.py", line 683, in task_add
    stdout, stderr = self._execute('add', *args)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/site-packages/taskw/warrior.py", line 476, in _execute
    raise TaskwarriorError(command, stderr, stdout, proc.returncode)
taskw.exceptions.TaskwarriorError: <unprintable TaskwarriorError object>

I get a notification for the new task every time but it is never properly created due to the above error.

I believe the title of the task is not properly escaped causing this issue. I am unsure whether this is a problem on bugwarrior's side or whether taskwarrior is actually incapable of handling such a scenario correctly.

If this is an "unfixable" problem I would be glad to have either of the following options:

1. postpone the notification until successful task creation
2. a configuration option to exclude tasks from being created based on (e.g.) a regex to match against the title (this is quite manual though that would be fine for me in a case like this)

If you need more information, please let me know. I am happy to provide. Thanks for the awesome work!

System Information

• Arch Linux
• kernel 5.6.13-arch1-1
• bugwarrior version: 1.7.0-2 (installed from the AUR)
• taskwarrior version: 2.5.1 (installed with pacman: 2.5.1-2)
• Python version: 3.8.3

[ryneeverett]

Somewhat related: ralphbean/taskw#110. I'm fairly sure this is going to end up being a taskw bug.

[ryneeverett]

See ralphbean/taskw#135 and #737.

[khaeru]

I also ran into The expression could not be evaluated.

The culprit was a GitHub milestone with the literal name "end June 2020", which led to bugwarrior, via taskw, trying to subprocess a command with b'githubmilestone:"end June 2020"' as one of the tokens/arguments. When I change the quoted text to another value (b'githubmilestone:"foo bar"'), the error does not occur.

Note that, unlike the description, this can't be resolved by giving githubmilestone positionally.

The mitigation is to not use the word "end" at the start of milestone names; or, more generally, probably not any Taskwarrior built-in attribute name (i.e. description, status, project, priority, due, recur, until, limit, wait, entry, end, start, scheduled, modified, depends) at the start of any value that gets assigned to a Bugwarrior string UDA. For instance, I tried throwing in b'githubbody:"recur foo"'; this triggered the same error.

As for a fix, no clue from me.

[wookietreiber]

There is also id. The short name of my company is iDiv and I often write it without caps. Hence, I've been replacing id with myd so it becomes mydiv for quite a while now, see here. Not pretty but it works for me ;)

[ryneeverett]

#737 now passes with taskwarrior-2.6.1. I haven't tried any other versions but it looks like we were all using taskwarrior-2.5.1 before.