Privacy Browser Android

05-11 13:36:57.393 D/AndroidRuntime( 4480): Shutting down VM
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): FATAL EXCEPTION: main
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): Process: com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard, PID: 4480
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unrecognized backslash escape sequence in pattern near index 41
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): /https?:\/\/.*.streamplay\.biz\/.*(\?|&|\
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): ^
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at java.util.regex.Pattern.compileImpl(Native Method)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1433)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Pattern.java:1408)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:966)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at java.util.regex.Pattern.matches(Pattern.java:1074)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at b.b.a.f.c.a(Unknown Source:4303)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at com.stoutner.privacybrowser.activities.MainWebViewActivity$d.shouldInterceptRequest(Unknown Source:529)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at android.webkit.WebViewClient.shouldInterceptRequest(WebViewClient.java:227)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at ib.a(PG:15)
05-11 13:36:57.394 E/AndroidRuntime( 4480): at org.chromium.android_webview.AwContentsBackgroundThreadClient.shouldInterceptRequestFromNative(PG:2)
05-11 13:36:57.443 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.
05-11 13:36:57.481 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.
05-11 13:36:57.513 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.
05-11 13:36:57.544 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.
05-11 13:36:57.566 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.
05-11 13:36:57.567 E/cr_AwBgThreadClient( 4480): Client raised exception in shouldInterceptRequest. Re-throwing on UI thread.

There are two kind of these entries inside easylist.txt :

/^https?:\/\/.*powvideo\.net\/.*(\?|&|\$|=|&|!)/$script,subdocument
/^https?:\/\/.*.streamplay\.biz\/.*(\?|&|\$|=|&|!)/$script,subdocument

Trying now if removing them fix the crash.

Browser doesn't crash anymore without those two entries, I think should be reported to easylist mantainers.

Indeed, I asked them if they could provide an alternative syntax:

https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/5338

Thank you.

Looking at the error more closely, the problem is that the parser used by Privacy Browser is truncating the entry at the first `$`. Normally, EasyList uses a syntax where the `$` indicates the end of the URL and the beginning of the EasyList types. However, in the case of these two entries, the are two `$`, with the first one being part of the regular expression. Truncating at the first `$` causes the regular expression to be invalid, which causes the crash.

The easiest solution is to remove or modify these entries from EasyList before adding it to Privacy Browser. I already have to do that with a couple of other entries for different reasons as documented at https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser/blocklists/easylist/. The more difficult solution is to get EasyList to modify these entries, as I have a hard time believing any of the URLs they are trying to block actually contain `$`. Rather, these regular expressions look like they were written by someone trying to catch all possible string combinations.

I saw that they changed them, but they not addressed the problem:

``/^https?:\/\/.*.(streamplay|steamplay).*\/.*[?&$=&!]/$script,subdocument
/^https?:\/\/.*(powvideo|powvldeo|povvideo).*\.*[?&$=&!]/$script,subdocument
/^https:\/\/([a-z]+\.)?sythe\.org\/\$.*[\w\W]{20,}/$image``

Plus we have now a third regex causing the problem, I have seen https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser/blocklists/easylist/ , maybe could be added as a case.

Yeah, I'll probably just have to delete those entries every time.

Note that all of these problematic entries were eventually removed upstream by EasyList.