Parenthesis are Mistaken as Part of the URL

  • Resolved DevynCJohnson

    (@devyncjohnson)


    9 years, 2 months ago

    Parenthesis are usually (but not always) mistaken as part of the URL when a URL is placed in parenthesis. For instance, on my website’s “About” page (https://dcjtech.info/about/), I have a sentence that says

    The quizzes ( https://dcjtech.info/quizzes/ ) are free and publicly available.

    Notice that I have the URL in parenthesis, but with spaces. Without the spaces, “External-Links” will think the the URL is “https://dcjtech.info/quizzes/)”. Yes, the parenthesis at the end fuse with the URL, but not the parenthesis in the front.

    As of now, my only to solutions is to use spaces as padding, or to hard-code the URL (via the “a” tag and href).

    This problem also occasionally occurs with other punctuation like periods and quotes.

    By the way, this is still a great plugin.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/sem-external-links/

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author Mike Koepke

    (@mike_koepke)

    I am not seeing the issue with the parenthesis with or without the spaces. If have used your link in both cases without an issue. Link remains in tack and class=”external” and rel=”nofollow” get added as link attributes.

    Are you writing it as simple text https://dcjtech.info/quizzes/ or are you indeed making it a true link to begin with?

    Thread Starter DevynCJohnson

    (@devyncjohnson)

    Whoops, sorry. On my website’s “About” page (https://dcjtech.info/about/), I hard-coded the hyperlinks a few days after I made the above post because I was unsure how soon you could look at the problem ad fix it. Plus, people were complaining about the flawed hyperlinks.

    I just now removed the hard-coded links in the third paragraph (that starts out as “There are many downloads”). So now, “External Links” is creating the hyper-link. As you can now see, “(https://dcjtech.info/forum/downloads/),” is considered an URL with a parenthesis and comma at the end.

    The third paragraph should look like

    There are many downloads (https://dcjtech.info/forum/downloads/), articles/tutorials (https://dcjtech.info/forum/articles/), forums (https://dcjtech.info/forum/qa/), and more (https://dcjtech.info/sitemap/). Users can read articles in a recommended order by topic/subject (https://dcjtech.info/guides/).

    But looks like the below instead

    There are many downloads (https://dcjtech.info/forum/downloads/), articles/tutorials (https://dcjtech.info/forum/articles/), forums (https://dcjtech.info/forum/qa/), and more (https://dcjtech.info/sitemap/). Users can read articles in a recommended order by topic/subject (https://dcjtech.info/guides/).

    So far, I have noticed that the “External Links” plugin thinks that commas, periods, and parenthesis that are after the URL are part of the URL. I manage to avoid this issue by hard-coding the links (add them myself) or placing spaces on both sides of the URL.

    Thread Starter DevynCJohnson

    (@devyncjohnson)

    NOTE: I noticed that this website (www.ads-software.com) does not allow commas and periods to be used in the “href” of an <a> tag, but you get the idea.

    Here is a screenshot of the bug – https://dcjtech.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/External-links.jpg

    Below is the code that the “External Links” plugin created. The plugin should not be using the parenthesis and comma that follows the URL.

    <a href="https://dcjtech.info/forum/downloads/),">https://dcjtech.info/forum/downloads/),</a>

    Plugin Author Mike Koepke

    (@mike_koepke)

    Your reply actually helps bunches. I didn’t realize it was the Auto Convert functionality that you were having issues with.

    The original code was meant to be decent enough to catch most text patterns. There is cases it obviously needs to be expanded to handle better. I’ll look into the punctuation cases.

    Plugin Author Mike Koepke

    (@mike_koepke)

    When using the Auto Convert you would need to have a space on both sides of the text in order for it not to be part of the url. Parenthesis are actually valid url characters. The code would not be able to know the difference in your intention.

    Valid url characters are:

    A-Z a-z 0-9 – . _ ~ : / ? # [ ] @ ! $ & ‘ ( ) * + , ; =

    Thread Starter DevynCJohnson

    (@devyncjohnson)

    Thanks for the info and new version. I should have known that parenthesis were acceptable. After reading your comment, I then remembered that Wikipedia uses parenthesis in some of its URLs. I never knew that semicolons and some of the other characters were acceptable.

    I have the same issue. Strangely in some cases the “)” is included to the link, on others not.

    So do I see it right that the only possibilities are to either use a space after the URL or link them manually in the WP editor?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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