DomainKey semicolon escaping

I’m hitting an issue running octodns-sync (without --do-it FWIW) with it complaining about an unescaped semicolon when the semicolon is in-fact escaped.

Take a record that looks like this for foo.com:

mail._domainkey:
  ttl: 900
  type: TXT
  value: v=DKIM1\;p=iamakey

When attempting to use Route53 and NS1 as the providers (I didn’t test others), you get this nice error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<path>/dns/env/bin/octodns-sync", line 11, in <module>
    load_entry_point('octodns', 'console_scripts', 'octodns-sync')()
  File "<path>/dns/env/src/octodns/octodns/cmds/sync.py", line 39, in main
    dry_run=not args.doit, force=args.force)
  File "<path>/dns/env/src/octodns/octodns/manager.py", line 235, in sync
    plans = [p for f in futures for p in f.result()]
  File "<path>/dns/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/concurrent/futures/_base.py", line 422, in result
    return self.__get_result()
  File "<path>/dns/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/concurrent/futures/_base.py", line 381, in __get_result
    raise exception_type, self._exception, self._traceback
Exception: Invalid record mail._domainkey.foo.com., unescaped ;

Am I doing something wrong here?

[ross]

It looks like this might be another semicolon escaping issue? The value shown in the Route53 console is unescaped, then it is escaped by OctoDNS when it is dumped via octodns-dump. An octodns-sync run that specifically targets route53 will show that there are no changes required, but one against nsone will show the above changes as being required.

Cool. That is the expected behavior. It’ll leave the Route53 record along, but if it were to change for any other reason in the future it would go ahead and escape the data sent up. Essentially it normalizes things if it’s otherwise going to touch them.

Going to call this closed, but feel free to open it back up if we run into further problems. This is definitely a confusing area. I’ve improved the error messages around validation in recent commits which will hopefully help a bit in the future.

[ross]

Just tried it without wrapping the value in " and a single \ worked. I guess i assumed the value needed to be wrapped.

Ah! That’s a yaml quoting thing. None of our values are quoted and I’d recommend avoiding them unless you’re doing things that require them. You are correct that if things are quoted with " yaml will turn \\ into \.

a and b are equivalent here:

foo:
  a: hello\; world
  b: "hello\\; world"

>>> s = "---\nfoo:\n  a: hello\; world\n  b: \"hello\\\\; world\""
>>> print(s)
---
foo:
  a: hello\; world
  b: "hello\\; world"
>>> d['foo']['a'] == d['foo']['b']
True