Open keithrbennett opened 5 years ago
Apparently there are others who have discovered this bug: An excerpt from https://clburlison.com/macos-wifi-scanning/:
When you run airport with the --xml flag the command would fail to output properly formatted xml data. I did not spend a bunch of time trying to find the root issue since I wanted a working solution now and knew any potential bug fixes would take 3-18 months. One idea is that HP printers are broadcasting a SSID with unsafe characters, or maybe the airport command chokes when scanning in a highly saturated area.
You can see the result of a failed run below, without proper ending tags:
<dict>
<!-- removed for brevity-->
<key>SSID_STR</key>
<string>DIRECT-54-HP ENVY 4520 series</string>
<key>WPS_PROB_RESP_IE</key>
<dict>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_AP_SETUP_LOCKED</key>
<true/>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_CFG_METHODS</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_DEV_NAME</key>
<string>DIRECT-54-HP ENVY 4520 series</string>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_DEV_NAME_DATA</key>
<data>
RElSRUNULTU0LUhQIEVOVlkgNDUyMCBzZXJpZXM=
</data>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_MANUFACTURER</key>
<string>HP</string>
<key>IE_KEY_WPS_MODEL_NAME</key>
<string>ENVY 4520 series
fwiw, this airport bug is still the case on Catalina 10.15.2.
(This issue reported at https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/341517/airport-s-x-returns-truncated-output.)
The
avail_nets
command callsairport -s -x
to get available network information in (pseudo-)XML format. In several locations, if there is an HP printer network, the output terminates somewhere in that element, and the command fails. For example:Without the -x option, the output works, but, as I say, there is the space issue that prevents me from relying on it: