Split function spliting on the wrong character

Graylog Central (peer support)
1

1. Describe your incident:
Hi, all!

I’m trying to parse message using the split function, setting a pipe (|) as delimiter. But the function is spliting the message on the “-” character too.

2. Describe your environment:

  • OS Information: Ubuntu 22.04
  • Package Version: Graylog 4.3.8+8c4705e

3. What steps have you already taken to try and solve the problem?

I’m trying to configure a pipeline to parse syslog messages from a storage audit logs. Once the parse was not working, I created a rule just to debug the message and figure out what’s wrong.

There is as example of the syslog messages received:

S-1-5-21-2614985949-316108637-4164631079-11292|1000217|DataAZ0|3|10.12.241.109|SMB|CLOSE|SUCCESS|FILE|0:0|0:0|4775020572|/ifs/cluster0/DataAZ0/FILESERVER/PAE/Manufacturing Control.xls

The rule code is:

rule "debug"
when
    true
then
    debug( to_string(split("|", to_string($message.message))[0]) );
end

And the output in the server.log is like:

2024-06-21T13:38:20.652-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.652-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.704-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.704-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.704-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.704-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S
2024-06-21T13:38:20.916-03:00 INFO [Function] PIPELINE DEBUG: S

4. How can the community help?

As you can see, the function is spliting in the “-” character. What I am doing wrong?

2

Searching more, I’ve found an similar example and figured out that the “|” have to be “escaped” with “\\”. I’d already tried to do that with just a “\”. I don’t know if it’s some rule related to the char “|” or what.

Using “\\|” as delimiter solved the problem.

Even so, if someone could explain what the rule is and in which cases the “\\” escape should be used, I’d appreciate it!