ADC

PCRE character encoding format

August 20, 2024

Contributed by:

C C S

The Citrix ADC operating system supports direct entry of characters in the printable ASCII character set only—characters with hexadecimal codes between HEX 20 (ASCII 32) and HEX 7E (ASCII 127). To include a character with a code outside that range in your Web App Firewall configuration, you must enter its UTF-8 hexadecimal code as a PCRE regular expression.

Various character types require encoding using a PCRE regular expression if you include them in your Web App Firewall configuration as a URL, form field name, or Safe Object expression. They include:

Upper-ASCII characters. Characters with encodings from HEX 7F (ASCII 128) to HEX FF (ASCII 255). Depending on the character map used, these encodings can refer to control codes, ASCII characters with accents or other modifications, non-Latin alphabet characters, and symbols not included in the basic ASCII set. These characters can appear in URLs, form field names, and safe object expressions.
Double-Byte characters. Characters with encodings that use two 8-byte words. Double-byte characters are used primarily for representing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text in electronic format. These characters can appear in URLs, form field names, and safe object expressions.

ASCII control characters. Non-printable characters used to send commands to a printer. All ASCII characters with hexadecimal codes less than HEX 20 (ASCII 32) fall into this category. These characters should never appear in a URL or form field name, however, and would rarely if ever appear in a safe object expression.

The Citrix ADC appliance does not support the entire UTF-8 character set, but only the characters found in the following eight charsets:

English US (ISO-8859-1). Although the label reads, “English US,” the Web App Firewall supports all characters in the ISO-8859-1 character set, also called the Latin-1 character set. This character set fully represents most modern western European languages and represents all but a few uncommon characters in the rest.
Chinese Traditional (Big5). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the BIG5 character set, which includes all of the Traditional Chinese characters (ideographs) commonly used in modern Chinese as spoken and written in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and by many people of Chinese ethnic heritage who live outside of mainland China.
Chinese Simplified (GB2312). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the GB2312 character set, which includes all of the Simplified Chinese characters (ideographs) commonly used in modern Chinese as spoken and written in mainland China.
Japanese (SJIS). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the Shift-JIS (SJIS) character set, which includes most characters (ideographs) commonly used in modern Japanese.
Japanese (EUC-JP). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the EUC-JP character set, which includes all characters (ideographs) commonly used in modern Japanese.
Korean (EUC-KR). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the EUC-KR character set, which includes all characters (ideographs) commonly used in modern Korean.
Turkish (ISO-8859-9). The Web App Firewall supports all characters in the ISO-8859-9 character set, which includes all letters used in modern Turkish.
Unicode (UTF-8). The Web App Firewall supports certain more characters in the UTF-8 character set, including those used in modern Russian.

When configuring the Web App Firewall, you enter all non-ASCII characters as PCRE-format regular expressions using the hexadecimal code assigned to that character in the UTF-8 specification. Symbols and characters within the normal ASCII character set, which is assigned single, two-digit codes in that character set, are assigned the same codes in the UTF-8 character set. For example, the exclamation point (!), which is assigned hex code 21 in the ASCII character set, is also hex 21 in the UTF-8 character set. Symbols and characters from another supported character set have a paired set of hexadecimal codes assigned to them in the UTF-8 character set. For example, the letter a with an acute accent (á) is assigned UTF-8 code C3 A1.

The syntax you use to represent these UTF-8 codes in the Web App Firewall configuration is “\xNN” for ASCII characters; “\xNN\xNN” for non-ASCII characters used in English, Russian, and Turkish; and “\xNN\xNN\xNN” for characters used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For example, if you want to represent a ! in an Web App Firewall regular expression as a UTF-8 character, you would type \x21. If you want to include an á, you would type \xC3\xA1.

Note:

Normally you do not need to represent ASCII characters in UTF-8 format, but when those characters might confuse a web browser or an underlying operating system, you can use the character’s UTF-8 representation to avoid this confusion. For example, if a URL contains a space, you might want to encode the space as \x20 to avoid confusing certain browsers and web server software.

Below are examples of URLs, form field names, and safe object expressions that contain non-ASCII characters that must be entered as PCRE-format regular expressions to be included in the Web App Firewall configuration. Each example shows the actual URL, field name, or expression string first, followed by a PCRE-format regular expression for it.

A URL containing extended ASCII characters.

Actual URL: http://www.josénuñez.com

Encoded URL: ^http://www\[.\]jos\\xC3\\xA9nu\\xC3\\xB1ez\[.\]com$
Another URL containing extended ASCII characters. Actual URL: http://www.example.de/trömso.html

Encoded URL: ^http://www[.]example[.\]de/tr\xC3\xB6mso[.]html$ A form field name containing extended ASCII characters.

Actual Name: nome_do_usuário

Encoded Name: ^nome_do_usu\xC3\xA1rio$
A safe object expression containing extended ASCII characters.

Unencoded Expression [A-Z]{3,6}¥[1-9][0–9]{6,6}

Encoded Expression: [A-Z]{3,6}\xC2\xA5[1-9][0–9]{6,6}

You can find some tables that include the entire Unicode character set and matching UTF-8 encodings on the Internet. A useful website that contains this information is at the following URL:

http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl
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For the characters in the table on this website to display correctly, you must have an appropriate Unicode font installed on your computer. If you do not, the visual display of the character may be in error. Even if you do not have an appropriate font installed to display a character, however, the description and the UTF-8 and UTF-16 codes on this set of webpages are correct.

The official version of this content is in English. Some of the Cloud Software Group documentation content is machine translated for your convenience only. Cloud Software Group has no control over machine-translated content, which may contain errors, inaccuracies or unsuitable language. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, suitability, or correctness of any translations made from the English original into any other language, or that your Cloud Software Group product or service conforms to any machine translated content, and any warranty provided under the applicable end user license agreement or terms of service, or any other agreement with Cloud Software Group, that the product or service conforms with any documentation shall not apply to the extent that such documentation has been machine translated. Cloud Software Group will not be held responsible for any damage or issues that may arise from using machine-translated content.

PCRE character encoding format

August 20, 2024

Contributed by:

C C S

August 20, 2024

Contributed by:

C C S

PCRE character encoding format

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