Hi!

I've been working on a patch for OsmoBSC which generates CTRL traps from OML Failure Event Reports as received from BTSs. This is quite obvious, of course we want failures generate traps, right?

The problem starts with the fact that Failure Event Reports can contain arbitrary strings ("Additional Text IE"), and that such text of course can contain spaces.

My current patch (https://gerrit.osmocom.org/#/c/osmo-bsc/+/14177) would produce TRAPs like this:

b'TRAP 0 bts.0.oml_failure_report "processing failure","failure ceased","TC_pcu_oml_alert"'

[where the b'' part is from python as I used osmo_ctrl.py to print the above]

As we never formally specified anything about the CTRL protocol apart from using ',' as a separator between fields, this is a somewhat grey area.

What do you guys think?

Do you know of existing CTRL interface usage where spaces are present in the 'value' part of the message?

Do you know of existing code that would break should we introduce support for quoted strings with spaces inside the 'value' part?

Regards, Harald