Problem with URLs

[pogo]

This Wikipedia page

Winter of 2009–10 in Great Britain and Ireland

If paste the URL in directly it breaks it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of ... ed_Kingdom

If I wrap it in tags it still doesn't work, either way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of ... ed_Kingdom

Winter of 2009–10 in Great Britain and Ireland

It's clearly the dash, formally an n-dash, between the years that's the problem. It displays it fine but the part that deals with URLs doesn't recognise it. URLs like this are uncommon on the general internet but very common on Wikipedia

[Jimaroid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of ... ed_Kingdom

Replace the n-dash with %96

phpBB doesn't parse the unicode characters in URLs properly

[rowan]

Ahh unicode, unicode. Seems a few things we've noticed recently here concern it.

I'm reminded of this thread [NOT trying to snipe at you pogo, just the point Daniel made that things pop up & bite people [like phpbb's developers]]

[pogo]

Any update on this? I mean this is the 21st century; Unicode has been a part of computer operating systems for that long, and common on the web for half that time. I can input 中文 but not common English non-ASCII characters.

[gravy]

Put it in a link shortner and use the URL tag to link

We use off the shelf bulletin board software so I'm a bit loath to trawl through the PHP and make bespoke changes to the URL parser.

[pogo]

That fixes the problem but I'm loth to use them; apart from the extra effort they're bad design from the point of view of knowing what you click on. Someone might wonder if they see it what I'm hiding, i.e. is it a malicious link? And if they become commonplace here it will become easier for people to hide misleading links, which can range from the annoying to the dangerous.

I had a quick look at it yesterday, looking through their bug database for any bugs on it but could not find any. That might be the easiest way to address it; create a bug for it or comment/vote on an existing one, so it gets onto the radar of someone familiar with the code able to fix it to work normally with Unicode.

[gravy]

What articles have em dashes in them on wikipedia? I've seet a lot with subtraction signs.

Have you gto a link?

EDIT

I just tried the one above, it works with a subtraction sign in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of ... ed_Kingdom

[pogo]

A whole heck of them have n-dashes – one of the things that's been happening slowly but religiously is people going round fixing them, so anything which has a range in the title for example, which includes many historical articles, should use a dash not a hyphen. E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965–66_L ... .C._season

As you can imagine there are a lot like that for teams and seasons.

They may have redirects with a minus sign but noticing that's needed than tracking it down is a bit of work. A less obvious example that also doesn't work (It's a valid link: 中文 is Chinese for Chinese language and the link redirects there).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/中文

You also get non-ASCII characters in domain names now. This is quite new and not that widespread as far as I know but that just means it has lots of scope to grow and take off. This following is just a placeholder at the moment but is a perfectly valid URL:

http://中文.com

[pogo]

It’s been fixed, apparently:

https://wiki.phpbb.com/Release_Highlights/3.1.3

Support for IDN (IRI) Urls - Urls in BBCodes, posts and profile fields can now contain UTF8 characters

Which would seem to fix the problem. A fuller description is here:

http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic ... 08&t=42633

Hardly enough reason to update the software on its own but perhaps another reason to upgrade if it’s being considered.

[Misfit]

Hardly enough reason to update the software on its own but perhaps another reason to upgrade if it’s being considered.

Like to add a mobile friendly skin....?

[Flojomojo]

Hardly enough reason to update the software on its own but perhaps another reason to upgrade if it’s being considered.

Like to add a mobile friendly skin....?

My thoughts exactly

[pogo]

One more example - thankfully I used preview so spotted it.

http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?p=1633986#p1633986

This will happen more and more