dash '-' break parsing

[mirsella]

hello

for example

SERVICE_NAME_ARTICLE-PARSER=article-parser

error on index 20, which is the first - in the key

[jesse-van-der-wolf]

I think that's intended behaviour:

dotenvy/dotenvy/src/parse.rs

Line 71 in 86c0d6d

fn parse_key(&mut self) -> Result<String, ParseBufError> {

Also, I think the convention for environment variables in Dotenv files is to follow the POSIX standard:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition/basedefs/V1_chap08.html

Although the '.' character does seem to be allowed in this implementation.

[mirsella]

yup this is probably off spec, but i think it should be more permissive, to allow more use case. for example, the widely used npm package dotenv works with dash and everything

so yeah its more a feature request than a bug report

[jesse-van-der-wolf]

Question is, where do you draw the line. I would argue that at some point you'd require the user to think different about naming their variables, not the tool having to adapt to every type of possible edge case. I actually had the same issue you had, with exactly the same character. It forced me to look a bit deeper into how I was naming my variables and I just changed that instead.

[mirsella]

i agree, and i like correctness.
but sadly, these things we do not always control. for example i stumbled upon this problem because an automatic update of coolify added an environment variable from services names where there was a dash '-', and we can't disable it.

but especially im not even using the env variable with '-'. dotenvy error just if one exist in the env, even if not used. so if something in the user env has a '-' for example, added by the user or another program using the current env, dotenvy will error, and create a "DOS".

[jesse-van-der-wolf]

@allan2 (or some other active maintainer), can we not use a regex based approach for keys like python dotenv:
https://github.com/theskumar/python-dotenv/blob/16f2bdad2ebbaae72790514cce713d2d22ab0f7c/src/dotenv/parser.py#L22

I'm willing to work on this if you can help guide me a bit.