Opaque Key Delimiter Ambiguity Audit

Description

Audit literal delimiter occurrences and empty components before naive opaque composite-key joining; reports hazards without inventing an escaping dialect.

An opaque key’s representation can affect equality and ordering even when its underlying value is unchanged. Delimiter joining can be ambiguous, fixed-width padding can preserve numeric order within agreed bounds, and typed length-prefix framing keeps scalar types distinct. Lengths in this family count UTF-16 code units unless a different unit is stated.

Audit literal delimiter occurrences and empty components before naive opaque composite-key joining; reports hazards without inventing an escaping dialect.

When to use this tool

Use this tool to audit literal delimiter occurrences and empty components before naive opaque composite-key joining; reports hazards without inventing an escaping dialect.

How to use the tool and how it works

Enter components, delimiter using the field definitions below.
Run the operation. Correct input errors before interpreting an output.
Read result.ambiguousComponents, result.emptyComponents. Use the ordering, boundary rules and absence conditions described below.

Require a nonempty delimiter and report component indexes containing it, separately from indexes of empty components.^[1]

Input field	Meaning and units	Accepted input
components	Explicit component strings before naive joining.	Dense list of at most 128 strings, each at most 8,192 UTF-16 code units.
delimiter	Nonempty separator string; not an escape language.	Text, at most 8,192 UTF-16 code units; the operation’s grammar also applies.

Output field	Interpretation
result	Object containing the named fields below.
result.ambiguousComponents	Component positions containing the joining delimiter.
result.emptyComponents	Component positions equal to the empty string.

json

{
  "input": {
    "components": [
      "a:b",
      "",
      "c"
    ],
    "delimiter": ":"
  },
  "output": {
    "result": {
      "ambiguousComponents": [
        0
      ],
      "emptyComponents": [
        1
      ]
    }
  }
}

Limitations and assumptions

This detects ambiguous naive joining without escaping or constructing a collision-free encoding.
String framing and alphabet digits use UTF-16 code units, not bytes or grapheme clusters. Exact integer text accepts a signed decimal spelling of at most 256 digits before operation-specific range checks.
Every declared top-level input field is required and unexpected fields are rejected. Ordinary strings are limited to 8,192 UTF-16 code units and lists to 128 entries, with tighter operation-specific bounds where stated. JSON text has bounded nesting and node counts.
Numeric outputs must be finite and no larger in absolute magnitude than the safe-integer limit; operations returning exact large integers use decimal text. Positions are zero-based and spans end exclusively unless the operation explicitly states a different convention.

Alternative or Complementary methods

Use typed framing when distinct scalar types or tuple boundaries must remain distinguishable. Keep alphabet, width, normalization and numeric bounds consistent between producers and consumers.

References

Tool behavior and example: Opaque Key Delimiter Ambiguity Audit — tool.io

Similar or alternative tools

Opaque Key Affix Normalizer
Ensure caller prefix and suffix are present after stripping/reapplying at most one matching affix; repeated inner affixes remain literal data, no recursive stripping or path semantics.
Opaque Key Alphabet Audit
Audit opaque key UTF-16 code units against an explicit caller alphabet with positions; not Unicode grapheme, entropy or checksum validation.