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Link in message is broken but URL looks OK

FloatingBones

FloatingBones

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 19, 2006
1,536
823
In this message, the link the poster provided gets a 404 error. The link has a gratuitous space at its end.

However, when I start drafting a reply with the quote button, the URL I see in the quoted reply is correct: no trailing space. I copy and paste the URL from the message and I get to the page the poster intended.

Am I missing something?
 
FloatingBones said:
In this message, the link the poster provided gets a 404 error. The link has a gratuitous space at its end.

However, when I start drafting a reply with the quote button, the URL I see in the quoted reply is correct: no trailing space. I copy and paste the URL from the message and I get to the page the poster intended.

Am I missing something?
Click to expand...
Try this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...hing-case-will-go-forward-u-s-judge-says.html

The poster had %22/ at the end of the link, which made it not work.

When you quoted the post, the trailing space was dropped.
 
Last edited:
When I quote the post with the bad URL, I get exactly the same bad URL.

Somebody who notices a bad URL is welcome to fix it when quoting the post.
 
Doctor Q said:
When I quote the post with the bad URL, I get exactly the same bad URL.
Click to expand...

That's what's confusing me: when I quote the post with the bad URL, the URL string no longer has the trailing space. You seem to be seeing a different result than I am. :confused:

Here is what the edit box looks like immediately after I hit the quote button on the message in question:

URL_corrected.jpg


Note: the URL has been changed: no trailing space.
 
Last edited:
%22 is a URL-encoded quotation mark. The forum software probably saw it as extraneous punctuation when you quoted the post and trimmed it off. Apparently the same check wasn't made when it was originally posted.
 
The %22 is not trimmed off. It's just shown in its more natural form: a double quote mark.

According to the rules of URLs, certain punctuation characters in URLs have to be represented in the %xx syntax, where xx is the hex value of the character. Decimal 22 is the value of the ASCII double quote character, so %22 is the URL syntax for a double quote character.

The extra trailing " in sazivad's post is shown as %22 in the resulting URL. When you quote the post you see the " syntax. It's the same character, shown two ways. If you view the bad post and hover over the link you'll see %22 in the URL. If you quote the post you'll see " in its place. But if you preview the post with the quote (or post it) you'll once again see the %22 form.

It's the same idea as seeing [b]hello[/b] while editing a post and hello when you make the post. Same information in two syntaxes.

I'll mention, while hoping not to confuse things further, that you can write a URL in a post as either
[url=https://www.macrumors.com]MacRumors[/url] <--- no quote marks​
or
[url="https://www.macrumors.com"]MacRumors[/url] <--- matching quote marks​
but if you include only one of the two double quote marks your post will be broken.
 
Darth.Titan said:
%22 is a URL-encoded quotation mark. The forum software probably saw it as extraneous punctuation when you quoted the post and trimmed it off. Apparently the same check wasn't made when it was originally posted.
Click to expand...

I tried to reproduce the behavior in message #3 of this thread. I copied the URL from the posting in question. When I do a quote of message #3, the extraneous punctuation is still there.
 
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