Topic: Problem With Right/Close Parenthesis (curved bracket) in Link

[Stuart]

I noticed this when I posted the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Williams_(actor)

Spencer Williams

It shows up, just not as part of the link. And it doesn't appear to matter where it is in the link.

[Slack]

Weird, we'll see what Mr. Tech Support says.

[Rivers]

SMF bug I think. Will be fixed in the next release. Or not!

Another analysis would be that the SMF PHP code is regarding it as an illegal URL, having that close parentheses character at the very end, and purposely breaking said assumed URL. In other words it could be interpreting it as an attempted SQL injection attack. Just a wild guess. The HTML code being output looks like this:

Code: [Select]

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Williams_(actor" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Williams_(actor</a>)
Notice the final bracket is outside the html link construct. Or it could just be a bug. I'll take a look at the php link formatting code when I'm feeling geeky.

[Stuart]

I copied the link into a new message and experimented by placing the ")" in several different locations in the link and checking the "Preview." It didn't seem to matter where it was as it always showed up as a non-link (black) character instead of the brown link character--on my screen, anyway.

Yeah, my guess is that it's probably some bug or conflict. It doesn't matter much in this instance because it gets us close enough in Wiki. But somewhere down the line it just might require the standard "paste link into address bar" work around, or perhaps using TinyURL.

Thanks for taking a look.

[Rivers]

I'm going to try something to see if I can make it work:

Spencer Williams

Yup, that worked, much to my surprise. Here's the SMF markup code for it:

Code: [Select]

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Williams_(actor)]Spencer Williams[/url]
Just copy that and paste it into your post as is.

It's clearly a bug in the SMF code that converts raw, inline URLs into HTML valid <a> links.

[Stuart]

Thanks, Rivers. Consider it done. I left the original in for reference.

[Stuart]

It happened again last night with this link:

https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Chinky_Pin_(1)

https://tinyurl.com/2p5svvn9

The work around was to convert it using TinyURL. It appears that the problem with ")" appeared and was resolved in 2019 using a different method, but the underlying glitch is still with us.