[type='CNAME'] crashed my Textual TUI: why escaping user text isn't enough

The setup

I have been building a small tool called claude-relay. It passes messages between terminal sessions running on the same machine: one session finishes a piece of work, sends a short message, another session picks it up. Think of it as a tiny local message queue with a chat-style front end.

That front end is a terminal UI built with Textual and Rich. It lists incoming messages and renders the selected one as a chat bubble. The catch is that the message bodies are not clean strings I wrote. They are whatever a session decided to send: shell output, stack traces, Terraform plans, ticket IDs. The TUI has to render arbitrary text from outside my control. That is the detail that turned out to matter.

The crash

One day a message arrived with a Terraform error in the body. I selected it, and the entire UI died:

MarkupError: Expected markup value (found "='CNAME'] but it already exists]\n").

The text that triggered it was completely ordinary:

Error: [type='CNAME'] but it already exists

A bracketed token inside an error message. Harmless in a log file. But Textual and Rich treat square brackets as markup, so that one message took down the whole interface. Worse, any message containing brackets would do the same, and brackets are everywhere in developer output: ticket tags, type hints, array syntax, that Terraform error. The tool was unusable the moment real data flowed through it.

Why a bracket is a bomb

Rich uses [...] for inline styling: [b]bold[/b], [dim]quiet[/dim], [red]alert[/red]. Textual renders on top of Rich, so any string you hand to a widget's update() runs through that markup parser first.

My message bubble was built the obvious way:

child.update(f"[b]{direction}[/b]\n{msg.body}")

When msg.body contains [type='CNAME'], the parser sees a tag named type='CNAME', cannot make sense of it, and throws. The fix looked trivial. It took four commits and three wrong turns to actually get right.

Wrong turn 1: escape the user content

The textbook move is to escape anything that came from outside, and Rich ships rich.markup.escape() for exactly this. I wrapped every user-supplied field in it (from_peer, to_peer, subject, body) across eight files.

It still crashed.

The reason took a while to surface. Textual 8.x no longer renders through Rich's markup tokeniser. It has its own visualize path, and that path does not honour Rich's backslash-escape convention. escape() dutifully turned [ into \[, and Textual's parser choked anyway. Escaping is parser-specific: an escape that satisfies one tokeniser means nothing to another.

Wrong turn 2: my own template had brackets in it

While chasing the user content, I missed that I had planted brackets myself. My truncation suffix read:

"\n[dim]…[truncated, press Enter to view full][/dim]"

[truncated, press Enter to view full] is a bracketed phrase sitting inside [dim]...[/dim]. The parser reads it as a nested tag. The call was crashing on a string I wrote, not on any user data. Swapping the inner brackets for parentheses fixed that case:

"\n[dim](truncated, press Enter to view full)[/dim]"

The lesson I keep relearning: the parser parses your templates too, not only the data you pour into them.

The fix that holds: never let the parser see user text

Here is the actual answer, stated plainly. Stop mixing the two worlds. Parse markup only for the parts you control, and append everything from outside as literal text that never reaches the parser.

In practice that means building a rich.text.Text object instead of a markup string. Static.update() accepts a Text renderable and prints it as-is:

rendered = Text.from_markup(header)   # only the parts WE control

rendered.append("\n")

rendered.append(body_text)            # user content, literal: parser never sees it

child.update(rendered)

Brackets in the body now render as brackets, because the body is never parsed as markup at all.

Wrong turn 3: even Text composition has a trap

I applied the same idea to the message-detail view and it crashed again:

MarkupError: closing tag '[/b]' doesn't match any open tag

I had built the title as a chain of from_markup calls:

# each from_markup() parses on its own, so the lone [/b] has nothing to close

title = Text.from_markup("[b]")

title.append(subject)

title.append_text(Text.from_markup("[/b] ..."))

Text.from_markup() is a parser, not a concatenator. Each call parses independently, so a dangling [/b] in a later call has no matching open tag. The fix is to drop markup syntax for programmatic styling and use the API directly:

title = Text()

title.append(subject, style="bold")

title.append(f"   ({msg.state.value})", style="dim")

No parser involved. No way to crash.

Where it landed

After those four commits the TUI renders arbitrary message bodies cleanly. The rule I walked away with is simple: markup syntax is a template language, and the programmatic Text API is for code. The moment you split [b]...[/b] across function calls or interpolate a variable into a markup string, you are writing code, so take the code path. Markup strings are safe only for fully self-contained, balanced literals: a fixed help line, a status glyph like [yellow]●[/yellow].

One more thing that made this hard to catch: these bugs hide from your tests. Textual's run_test(headless=True) renders to a virtual screen that does not exercise the same path as a real terminal launch. Every one of these crashes appeared only when I ran the real app against real data. My regression tests now feed the renderer the genuinely nasty inputs on purpose: [type='CNAME'], [ABC-1234], list[int], a markdown link.

It is the same discipline as escaping on output in HTML. Trust no string with brackets that came from outside your code, and remember the parser is just as happy to choke on a bracket you wrote yourself.