[Kea-users] commas in value

[Carsten Strotmann]

Hi Christoph,

On 7 Jul 2025, at 9:21, Christoph Pleger wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In my kea DHCP4 configuration, I have this line:
>
> "data": "dc=cs,dc=tu-dortmund,dc=de"
>
> As I discovered on the client side, the commas are interpreted as strong separators, so that when I print that data on client side, only dc=cs is printed. What syntax do I have to use in the config so that the whole above string is interpreted as one value?
>


from:
https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/kea-3.0.0/arm/dhcp4-srv.html#standard-dhcpv4-options

When a data field is a string and that string contains the comma (,; U+002C) character, the comma must be escaped with two backslashes (\\,; U+005C). This double escape is required because both the routine splitting of CSV data into fields and JSON use the same escape character; a single escape (\,) would make the JSON invalid. For example, the string "foo,bar" must be represented as:

"Dhcp4": {
    "subnet4": [
        {
            "pools": [
                {
                    "option-data": [
                        {
                            "name": "boot-file-name",
                            "data": "foo\\,bar"
                        }
                    ]
                },
                ...
            ],
            ...
        },
        ...
    ],
    ...
}

Greetings

Carsten