Markdown produces broken link

Question

Input

The answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/415257/20394 includes the markdown

...for the GWT widgets themselves: [Source for RadioButtonTest][1]
...
[1]: http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#A1edwVHBClQ/user/test/com/google/gwt/user/client/ui/RadioButtonTest.java&q=ButtonTest%20package:http://google-web-toolkit\.googlecode\.com "Source for RadioButtonTest"

Observed Result

This results in the HTML (line-breaks added for clarity)

...for the GWT widgets themselves:
http://google-web-toolkit\.googlecode\.com"
title="Source for RadioButtonTest">Source for RadioButtonTest</p>
...

This produces a partial tag including an un-escaped '>' character.

Expected Result

Replacing the google-web-toolkit\.googlecode\.com with google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com causes it to produce the expected HTML:

...for the GWT widgets themselves:
<a
 href="http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#A1edwVHBClQ/user/test/com/google/gwt/user/client/ui/RadioButtonTest.java&amp;q=ButtonTest%20package%3ahttp://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com"
 rel="nofollow"
 title="Source for RadioButtonTest"
>Source for RadioButtonTest</a>
...

Commentary

Backslashes (\) are not allowed in URIs so the input is partially invalid (since they are neither in the unreserved nor sub-delim character sets in RFC 3986), but their presence inside a URI should not cause broken tags in the rendered output.

I have not tested whether the rich text editor produces this escaping behavior.

Answer 1

This is long fixed; note that that answer is over three years old, so the HTML you saw was rendered way back then.

As you can see on the revision page, these days the HTML created from that Markdown is harmless. (Unlike the answers you see on the question page, the revision view is always rendered with today's Markdown converter.)