problem with HTML in link

February 3, 2004 5:38 PM

Link gets munged on preview [more inside.]
posted by homunculus to Bugs at 5:38 PM (8 comments total)

In my last post, everytime I previewed this link:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new?id=Cha2Can&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/mideng-parsed&tag=public&part=44&division=div1


It changed to this:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new?id=Cha2Can&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/mideng-parsed&tag=public?=44&division=div1


The "public&part" changes to "public?"

(The mistake I made in the FPP was missing the 1 at the end when copying.)
posted by homunculus at 5:42 PM on February 3, 2004

Oh crap, the weird little symbol has been replaced with a "?"

I can't do anything right. :(
posted by homunculus at 5:44 PM on February 3, 2004

i have absolutely no idea what you are on about
posted by Frasermoo at 6:24 PM on February 3, 2004

∂ < --- you mean this symbol?br>
In HTML these days, you can get a bunch of special characters by typing in special codes, all of which start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. So if you type in &part; you get the partial-derivative symbol ∂.

It should be just fine if you check over your code before hitting the post button. I'm not sure if there's a workaround that Matt could code to keep these ISO symbols from being accidentally interpreted in links in the description field, though...
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:22 PM on February 3, 2004

And of course, the input field here interpreted my little plain-text arrow as an HTML tag. Ain't modern technology great?
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:24 PM on February 3, 2004

∂ you mean this symbol

Yep, that's the little bugger.

So if you type in ∂ you get the partial-derivative symbol ∂.

Ah, of course. Thanks Johnny.

I'm not sure if there's a workaround

Never mind then, Matt, I know you've got more than enough to do.
posted by homunculus at 10:00 PM on February 3, 2004

Seems to me that escaping all ampersands in URLs to &amp; should work. I don't think there's a browser that won't de-escape them before actually navigating to the URL.

Incidentally, something similar should probably be done in the textareas on comment pages, since when I was typing "&amp;amp;" to get "&amp;", it got collapsed back into &amp; and thus turned into an & on preview.
posted by zztzed at 1:50 AM on February 4, 2004

This is a great recursive conversation. It reminds me of Godel. And no, I'm not even gonna try to get that umlaut on the O.
posted by soyjoy at 8:25 AM on February 4, 2004