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Hyperlink button breaks some URLs when automatically undoing URL encoding

Links to Eclipse FAQs often end in encoded question marks, as the page URL is like the page title (and that is a question): http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_support_formatting_in_my_editor%3F

If you try to add that link to a word in an answer using the hyperlink editor dialog, then the question mark gets wrongly decoded, the inserted link ends in a unencoded question mark and the link is broken as in this example (please don't fix this one by editing!).

I've already red other bug reports of similar issues, which were all closed as "by design" or "cannot be changed". In this case however, I think the algorithm could really be improved, as it leads to inserting an URL ending in a question mark, but having no URL parameters after that question mark. The algorithm should rate that as being suspicious and insert the URL as is, instead of inserting it decoded.

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  • I put as you said, the link in my browser has been looking with ? at the end, but the page content itself didn't show up. Maybe it is more a mediawiki-problem? Because visiting page with %3F is fine, but changing only %3F to ? - it brokes up. I will try to find other mediawiki based links
    – Shegit Brahm
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 6:24
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    There are websites that actually include the punctuation in the URL? Sounds like their system could use some improvements too...
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 6:30
  • But do you see that the url in (my) browser still has the ? at the end but only error shows up? The url is like in your example, but the page doesn't accept it. TO me it looks like the MediaWiki-software is unable to handle a last ? on a title. Check this: wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_financial_planning_tools and try to put a ? in url at the end and press enter. No error occurs to me.
    – Shegit Brahm
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 6:45
  • @ShegitBrahm: You are exactly experiencing the issue I describe. The page title really contains the encoded characters as is. So if you try to visit the page using the question mark in the title, you already have the wrong URL. That is no mediawiki bug, but an SO bug.
    – Bananeweizen
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 6:59
  • @Bananeweizen What I wanted to show with my other link is that one other mediawiki-based wiki deliver content regardless a ? or %3F or nothing at the end even the wiki entry contains it. So I wonder how they deal with it.
    – Shegit Brahm
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 7:16
  • @ShegitBrahm: No, you are still wrong. First: answer.com does not use Mediawiki, as far as I can see. Second: You can add a "?" to any http URL that does not have URL parameters without causing problems, also to google.com or whatever you like. That just indicates explicit empty URL parameters. Third: It really does not matter wheather you find another site which can handle that issue, as it does not fix the issue for all the other sites.
    – Bananeweizen
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 7:56
  • @Bananeweizen my reference comes from mediawiki.org/wiki/Sites_using_MediaWiki/en so I trusted them without deeper knowledge or evidence.
    – Shegit Brahm
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 8:50

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