Detection of links with apostrophes

Jupiter · Aug 29th 2019

It's been reported to me that some URLs which contain commas are not displaying as proper links on my site. I've just done a test on this site and received the same result. Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary's_Church,_Broadwater

If I create a link using the toolbar, then this URL works fine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary's_Church,_Broadwater

The issue is not consistent. Only some pages with commas don't work, not all. Here's one that does work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners,_Drive-Ins_and_Dives

So far, the only reports I've received are about wikipedia pages. Could there be a conflict in links that have both apostrophes and commas?

thanks

Jupiter

Dukemaster · Sep 2nd 2019

This is interesting and seems to be related to a bug I found in the "Favicons" addon, posted in Tims Chat.

Perhaps it belongs to the code of Wikipedia

**Alexander Ebert** · Sep 24th 2019

The apostrophe has a special meaning in bbcodes as it is being used as a delimiter for attributes. For this particular reason, the link detection uses a more defensive approach where it will only consume text that are most likely part of the link. Apostrophes are very rarely used in links and I'm a bit surprised that wikipedia started using them, given that they were not used for many, many years before.

However, the link detection is a very critical component and making even slightest changes to the behavior can have devastating results. Therefore, we'll look into this in a future version.

Users can always embed those links using the link button from the toolbar which properly embeds the link and removes any ambiguity that the link detection may otherwise trip over.

Detection of links with apostrophes

Alexander Ebert Aug 30th 2019

Marcel Werk Sep 24th 2019

Alexander Ebert Sep 24th 2019

Alexander Ebert Feb 8th 2020

Marcel Werk Mar 1st 2020

Participate now!

Share