Bug report: Forking breaks highlighting for regular expression and other operations

[mattnotmax]

Describe the bug On Chrome, Firefox and Edge it appears that when you apply fork, a subsequent regex doesn't perform match highlighting as per screenshots below

To Reproduce

Write simple input and apply regex looking for string 'test'. Highlighting is applied

Fork the same input and the highlight will disappear / not be applied

This also appears to break text highlights for selecting text

And forked:

Expected behaviour Highlight of regex matches or selected text should occur regardless of fork operation being applied. I wonder if it relates to: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/issues/267

Screenshots As above

Desktop (if relevant, please complete the following information):

• Version: 9.37.3
• Compile time: 14/04/2022 17:10:14 UTC
• User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.41 Safari/537.36

Thank you!

[n1474335]

This is certainly something I would like to improve. I've removed the 'bug' label since this is expected behaviour at the moment. Highlighting is currently calculated purely based on offsets. The 'Fork' operation introduces unknown-length delimiters which the surrounding operations can't see. It wouldn't be possible for the Hexdump operation in your example to accurately calculate the correct offsets without knowing a lot more about its environment than it currently has access to, as well as understanding exactly how the Fork operation works and how it modified the input. For that reason, the Fork operation doesn't support highlighting and it will be turned off whenever it is active in the recipe.

As you note, #267 covers a potential solution to this, but it would represent quite a chunk of work and it's not currently near the top of the priority list. If someone wants to take this on or offer some thoughts on how it could be achieved, please go ahead!

[mattnotmax]

Thanks @n1474335 I appreciate the detailed explanation. Thanks as always for the tool and work.