Niels Lohmann f826b1e9f9 Reject JSON Patch move when from is a proper prefix of path ...

RFC 6902 (section 4.4) forbids "from" from being a proper prefix of
"path" for a "move" operation: "a location cannot be moved into one
of its children." "move" is implemented as remove-then-add with no
check for this. For object targets, the subsequent "add" happened to
throw as a side effect of resolving through the now-removed parent,
but for array targets, removing the "from" element shifts subsequent
indices, so "path" silently re-resolves to a different element and
the operation "succeeds" with a silently corrupted document.

Add a check, before performing the remove/add, for whether "from" is
a proper prefix of "path" at the reference-token level. This compares
json_pointer's already-unescaped reference_tokens vectors (basic_json
is a friend of json_pointer) rather than the raw pointer strings, so
that tokens containing escaped '/' or '~' characters are compared
correctly, and a token that merely looks like a string prefix (e.g.
"/ab" vs "/abc/x") is not mistaken for a pointer-token prefix. When
"from" is a proper prefix of "path", throw out_of_range.414.

Fixes #5397.

Stacked on top of the fix for #5396 (branch
issue-5396-patch-remove-primitive-parent), since both touch the same
patch_inplace move/remove handling in include/nlohmann/json.hpp.

Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>

2026-09-05 22:14:56 +02:00

..

nlohmann

Reject JSON Patch move when from is a proper prefix of path

2026-09-05 22:14:56 +02:00