My First Chrome Extension, part 2

January 8, 2010 1 Comment

I was fixated on how to get Chrome to pass a feed URL to my registered feed reader, Outlook 2010. After I figured out how to pass the message, it was nearly a one-liner to modify an existing extension. How many things could be wrong with one line of code that seems to be working?

url = url.replace( "%f", feedUrl.replace( "http:", "feed:" ) );

There are two bugs that I see in here.

1: URLs can legitimately include %f

From RFC 1738:

In addition, octets may be encoded by a character triplet consisting of the character "%" followed by the two hexadecimal digits (from "0123456789ABCDEF") which forming the hexadecimal value of the octet. (The characters "abcdef" may also be used in hexadecimal encodings.)

In practice this would affect URLs that include these characters:

  • ð -> %F0
  • ñ –> %F1
  • ò –> %F2
  • ó –> %F3
  • ô –> %F4
  • õ –> %F5
  • ö –> %F6
  • ÷ –> %F7
  • ø –> %F8
  • ù –> %F9
  • ú –> %FA
  • û –> %FB
  • ü –> %FC
  • ý –> %FD
  • þ –> %FE
  • ÿ –> %FF

The simple solution is to avoid using a macro character sequence that includes valid hexadecimal values. Sticking with a single ASCII character it could be anything from ‘g’ trhough ‘z’ except ‘s’, which is already being used.

2: A feed URL could have “http:” anywhere

The scheme for a URI is always at the beginning, but it is common for one URI to encode another one inside it. That is exactly how you pass a feed URL to Google Reader.

Imagine a feed URL like “http://feedify.exmaple/q=http://mysite.somewhere/page”. In order to pass this to the feed scheme handler I need to replace the http: scheme with feed: but my original code would also replace the second http:, which would break the URL.

The solution is to use a regular expression so that I only replace the http: scheme rather than every occurrence of the pattern “http:”. In Regular Expression syntax, the ^ character means that the pattern has to start with the beginning of the string.

^http:

I JavaScript, the shorthand for a Regular Expression object is paired / characters:

/^http:/

3:URI schemes are not case sensitive

The replace() method of the JavaScript String object is case sensitive. My code would not work on a URL like “HTTP://mysite.example/stuff”.

Fortunately, the Regular Expression object in JavaScript has a case-insensitive match mode. You set this with the ‘i’ option:

/^http:/i

3 Bugs in 1 Line: Fixed

url = url.replace( "%g", feedUrl.replace( /^http:/i, "feed:" ) );

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My First Chrome Extension

January 8, 2010 2 Comments

I am fairly hooked on Microsoft Outlook and I like to use the RSS reader function. I also have been living in Chrome 4 instead of Firefox for a few weeks now. One of the features of Firefox and IE is the ability to discover RSS and ATOM feeds and pass them to the registered feed reader.

Google has an extension for Chrome that almost does what I want. It discovers the feeds but it will only subscribe them with a web-based feed reader. What I did was hack on the RSS Subscriptions Extension (by Google) so that it would work with Outlook.

screen-shot

Outlook feeds by registering itself as the handler for the FEED scheme.

hkcr-scheme

That means anything that tries to invoke a URI like feed://somewhere.com/feed.rss, Outlook will be invoked with the /share switch like this:

"C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2\Office14\OUTLOOK.EXE"/share "feed://somewhere.com/feed.rss”

Outlook is very picky about the scheme on the URL. It has to be feed:// or it won’t work and that is the problem with the Google extension. It always puts the http:// scheme onto the URL and it assumes that you are going to embed this into a larger querystring to a web-based feed aggregator.

It was pretty easy to tweak the extension to do what I wanted. The meat of the change is really just one line of code:

url = url.replace( "%f", feedUrl.replace( "http:", "feed:" ) );

That makes it so that %f is a feed: scheme URI that will invoke the registered feed handler. For me this is Outlook 2010.

edit-shot

There is a little bit of supporting stuff here and there to make this work, but that’s the gist. Now, %f is the magic configuration to invoke the registered feed:// scheme application. It was surprisingly easy to get hacking on the extension and Google made it very easy to publish my work.

If this scratches your itch, you can get it from Chrome Extensions site.

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