[Sailfish X] CardDAV: messy parsing of name fields & Umlaut characters

Tracked by Jolla

asked 2018-03-18 23:33:37 +0300

rozgwi gravatar image

updated 2019-07-23 16:45:16 +0300

The Setup

Sailfish is set up to sync contacts with Nextcloud (12). The contacts originate from Thunderbird/CardBook. Syncing worked fine between NC, Thunderbird and Android.

The Problems

Many of my contacts don't have surnames or only nicknames. Now, these particular contacts (VCARD 3.0) get messed up by SailfishOS' CardDAV. There are two issues:

  1. Say there's a contact named Tony. He has no surname, so his name field looks like this N:;;;; (both FN and NICKNAME say Tony). After syncing the contact to SFOS it will soon be displayed as ;Tony;;;.
    This looks like some sort of parsing bug. Editing the entry and removing the semicolons seems to work but it I have seen it also duplicating the ;Tony;;; part, leading to Name fields looking like this: \;Tony\;\;\;;Tony;;;.

  2. The adress book uses categories for grouping. Although those categories do not show up in the SFOS contacts app (not yet supported?), they are parsed once a contact is edited on the phone. If the contacts category has an Umlaut, say ö, SFOS turns it into some unreadable character (displayed as À + an unknown-character box). I can not fix it other than deleting the contact.
    This wrongly encoded character completely knocks out Thunderbird/CardDAV (makes the CPU go haywire) _and_ prevents Nextcloud from parsing the contacts at all!
    This looks like Unicode is not correctly implemented in the parser.

In combination with 1., 2. is very annoying since removing the semicolons from the contact will always result in a corrupted contact

Update:
VCard 4.0 seems not to be affected by 1.
2. Happens independently of VCard version

another Update 1. apparently still present in SFOS 3.1

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Comments

2

I noticed the same issue.

I have a lot of contacts in the folder "collected addresses" without a name and only a mail address

mbpilotuser ( 2018-03-19 00:03:33 +0300 )edit

FYI: VCard v4 does not seem to be affected but I didn't do any further tests yet

rozgwi ( 2018-04-18 13:45:53 +0300 )edit
1

This also happens when only the company name is used! (without family or surname).

SaimenSays ( 2019-01-10 08:45:21 +0300 )edit

I always wondered what clobbered my address book as I have two-way sync enabled ...

Maus ( 2019-01-10 10:52:08 +0300 )edit

I can confirm number 1. I have some contacts with no First or Last name but with a Company name. One of them is something like "Sony CH" and the phone will create a Surname "CH;Sony;;;". Contacts are synced using Fruux.

Maximilian1st ( 2019-01-10 11:14:32 +0300 )edit