Encoding URLs

Certainly.

First, an online copy of Microsoft's JScript documentation is encodeURI Method (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/js56jsmthfencodeuri.asp). The international standard equivalent of JScript (or JavaScript; I get the two confused because they are nearly the same but only one is consistent with the standard) is ECMAScript. A PDF copy of the ECMAScript standard is available at
ECMA-262 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/ECMA-262.HTM). In the ECMAScript documentation I find the encodeURI function in paragraph 15.1.3.3.

It is not really encryption, it is encoding. I think the ECMAScript documentation specifies that encodeURI encodes a URI (URL) according to the UTF-8 standard, but I might be misunderstanding that part.

Originally posted by Andreas Masur
Note, that I had never such a problem, however, I am enclosing URLs always manually thus they do not get automatically parsed by the forum software... How are URLs included if they are not included "manually"?

The problem is that when I include an URL, it is not encoded. Therefore when the URL has "[LN]" in it the address gets messed up. It will happen to you too when you get a KB article URL with "[LN]" in it.

How do you know that an URL is not parsed (unencoded)? The unencoding occurs at the time the link is clicked. If there is nothing to change then there would be no indication that the URL had been unencoded. As far as I know, unencoding occurs automatically by the anchor tag (hyperlink).

I think the problem does not always happen to me. In other words, URLs for KB articles do not always have "[LN]" in them. I am not sure what the conditions are that cause the URLs to be that way. Perhaps that is a new format and they soon will all have the brackets ("[]") in them.

The following is a sample of an URL I am talking about:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];105675

Notice that the opening small bracket is mistakenly interpreted to be not a part of the URL. If that URL is put into an URL tag we get: ;105675]INFO: First and Second Chance Exception Handling (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN) which gets a portion of URL as the beginning of the text for it and it does not work. However if I first encode the URL using the JavaScript encodeURI function I get:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;105675

Which does work. That text can be used in an URL tag as in: INFO: First and Second Chance Exception Handling (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;105675) and it is that encoding that could be done by the bulletin board software.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];105675

Okay, I'm doing a test with the above URL...

The problem may be in how vBulletin interprets tags. The bracket ([) is an seen as a new tag and that throws vBulletin off when it is trying to automatically parse a URL. You can move the closing URL vBulletin tag to the end manually and the link will work.

Brad

I'm not sure, but I think it would be enough just to add quotes around the URL, like
[URL="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];105675"]Same URL[/URL]

example:
Same URL (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];105675)

One good reason for doing the encoding is that it is my understanding it is the standard solution. If I am wrong then it could be that it is not a good solution. However however it is done does not matter to us the user very much except it would help to have it done automatically. If quotes is the solution then it would make sense to have it done automatically.

Originally posted by Sam Hobbs One good reason for doing the encoding is that it is my understanding it is the standard solution. If I am wrong then it could be that it is not a good solution. However however it is done does not matter to us the user very much except it would help to have it done automatically. If quotes is the solution then it would make sense to have it done automatically.
I guess that quotes would work all the time, but it's a bit of hack. Anyways, it's true that it would be good if the script inserted the quotes automatically.