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I've just noticed that there appears to be a bug when trying to write an inline link in a comment using markdown. If the URL contains a http:// in the path component of the URI, things go wonky.

For example, I tried to include a link to a page archived on archive.org:

 Read the [archived version on archive.org](http://web.archive.org/web/20071102233627/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/lets-get-real-database.html)

This rendered as:

Read the xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/12/…" rel="nofollow">archived version on archive.org

In this specific case, you can manually edit the URL and drop the http:// from the path and archive.org still works, but that feels like a hacky fix.

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I know that the team has stated that this is [by-design]. It is too much work to parse links with the http: in them. Too much work for too little gain. –  jjnguy Jul 21 '10 at 20:53
Interesting. When you simply paste in the URL, it is parsed and linked correctly: web.archive.org/web/20071102233627/http://xooglers.blogspot.com/… AFAIK, having http: in a URL's path isn't technically invalid, is it? –  josh3736 Jul 21 '10 at 21:01
@josh, no, it is not technically invalid I don't think –  jjnguy Jul 21 '10 at 21:05
(Note to self: A comment with 4 negatives is really effing hard to understand.) –  jjnguy Jul 21 '10 at 21:06
@Justin: [ We don't need no education ](en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd#The_Red_Door_.5B1.4.5D "Yes, you do. You just used a double negative") –  perbert Jul 21 '10 at 21:21

1 Answer 1

You must escape the illegal characters in the URL.

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So if I enter %3A for :, things should be groovy? Let's test. That's a bit of an onerous requirement to impose on users, no? Especially considering that the major browsers display the colon unencoded - in fact, Chrome actually converts %3A back to : in the address bar. Even if the browsers aren't functioning strictly to spec (: is a reserved character), users should still be able to just copy-and-paste URLs from their address bar. –  josh3736 Jul 22 '10 at 3:58

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