NSNetService dictionaryFromTXTRecord fails an assertion on invalid input - ios

Question

The input to dictionary(fromTXTRecord:) comes from the network, potentially from outside the app, or even the device. However, Apple's docs say:
... Fails an assertion if txtData cannot be represented as an NSDictionary object.
Failing an assertion leaves the programmer (me) with no way of handling the error, which seems illogic for a method that processes external data.
If I run this in Terminal on a Mac:
dns-sd -R 'My Service Name' _myservice._tcp local 4567 asdf asdf
my app, running in an iPhone, crashes.
dictionary(fromTXTRecord:) expects the TXT record data (asdf asdf) to be in key=val form. If, like above, a word doesn't contain any = the method won't be able to parse it and fail the assertion.
I see no way of solving this problem other than not using that method at all and implementing my own parsing, which feels wrong.
Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Here's a solution in Swift 4.2, assuming the TXT record has only strings:
/// Decode the TXT record as a string dictionary, or [:] if the data is malformed
public func dictionary(fromTXTRecord txtData: Data) -> [String: String] {
var result = [String: String]()
var data = txtData
while !data.isEmpty {
// The first byte of each record is its length, so prefix that much data
let recordLength = Int(data.removeFirst())
guard data.count >= recordLength else { return [:] }
let recordData = data[..<(data.startIndex + recordLength)]
data = data.dropFirst(recordLength)
guard let record = String(bytes: recordData, encoding: .utf8) else { return [:] }
// The format of the entry is "key=value"
// (According to the reference implementation, = is optional if there is no value,
// and any equals signs after the first are part of the value.)
// `ommittingEmptySubsequences` is necessary otherwise an empty string will crash the next line
let keyValue = record.split(separator: "=", maxSplits: 1, omittingEmptySubsequences: false)
let key = String(keyValue[0])
// If there's no value, make the value the empty string
switch keyValue.count {
case 1:
result[key] = ""
case 2:
result[key] = String(keyValue[1])
default:
fatalError()
}
}
return result
}

Answer 2

I'm still hoping there's something I'm missing here, but in the mean time, I ended up checking the data for correctness and only then calling Apple's own method.
Here's my workaround:
func dictionaryFromTXTRecordData(data: NSData) -> [String:NSData] {
let buffer = UnsafeBufferPointer<UInt8>(start: UnsafePointer(data.bytes), count: data.length)
var pos = 0
while pos < buffer.count {
let len = Int(buffer[pos])
if len > (buffer.count - pos + 1) {
return [:]
}
let subdata = data.subdataWithRange(NSRange(location: pos + 1, length: len))
guard let substring = String(data: subdata, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) else {
return [:]
}
if !substring.containsString("=") {
return [:]
}
pos = pos + len + 1
}
return NSNetService.dictionaryFromTXTRecordData(data)
}
I'm using Swift 2 here. All contributions are welcome. Swift 3 versions, Objective-C versions, improvements, corrections.

Answer 3

I just ran into this one using Swift 3. In my case the problem only occurred when I used NetService.dictionary(fromTXTRecord:) but did not occur when I switched to Objective-C and called NSNetService dictionaryFromTXTRecord:. When the Objective-C call encounters an entry without an equal sign it creates a key containing the data and shoves it into the dictionary with an NSNull value. From what I can tell the Swift version then enumerates that dictionary and throws a fit when it sees the NSNull. My solution was to add an Objective-C file and a utility function that calls dictionaryFromTXTRecord: and cleans up the results before handing them back to my Swift code.