Multi line fix

[smtlaissezfaire]

This includes the little upgrades from the other pull request, plus: the multi-line fix.

Here's the multi-line issue. If you are outputting windows friendly text (with \r\n), stripping out \n will lead to some really odd things in unix land. Here's an example:

https://gist.github.com/943750

I ran into this issue when rails was outputting a mailer's contents to the log. It writes \r\n, not straight \n's, which was leading to all but the last line of the mailer cut off.

[noahd1]

I'm tempted to pull this, as it seems how I would probably want newlines to be handled, but it's not clear to me how this might impact existing log parsers. Hodel3000 was written (not by me) with the philosophy of being syslog-parser-compatible. Are you familiar with how syslog handles newlines? I did a quick google search and it appears that syslog will replace newlines with spaces.

Maintaining compatibility with syslog seems like the right way to go, though the current behavior is 1) not exactly compatible and 2) buggy with windows newlines as you have pointed out. Thoughts?

[smtlaissezfaire]

Here's what the syslog man page says:

"Newlines and other non-printable characters embedded in the message
string are printed in an alternate format. This prevents someone from
using non-printable characters to construct misleading log messages in an
output file."

http://www.manpagez.com/man/3/syslog/

I'm not exactly sure what to take out of that sentence. I guess it's to prevent control characters from user input misleading a sysop?

WDYT?

[noahd1]

I think your interpretation sounds about right. My tendency is defer to syslog on this, since it's been around a lot longer than its cousin hodel. Do you want to submit a patch to fix windows control characters?

[smtlaissezfaire]

Yeah, I'd have a tendency to defer to syslog as well if I understood how '\n' would mislead a sysop. I certainly understand the issue with other control characters, though.

It's interesting to note that other loggers (including the stdlib logger) don't remove newlines from a log. So presumably, if it has been a security issue, it's one that hasn't been noticed/fixed by any ruby user in the last 10+ years.

Basically - I'm pulling for my solution because it seems like it would be a real PITA for me to read a logger statement without the newlines in it. Namely, it misleads this sysop (me) when the newlines are replaced with spaces.

[noahd1]

Yeah, I can't think of how it would be a security issue. Perhaps in the syslog case, where it's a bit more of the wild-wild west as far as what can get logged, the potential confusion is more of a concern. Ok, I will merge it. I suppose I should note that this does have the potential in a (very) degenerate case for your log files to get filled up with newlines.