Tricky Little Elves

Dave, you seem to have a crew of tricky little elves working in the background of DG.....

I was responding to a thread in the Rose Forum regarding a vendor and was being lazy not to post a link to Gardenn WWatchdog since it had already been posted in the previous response. But those tricky little elves jumped right in and made it a link for me. :-) Cute trick, but what if I had spelled it incorrectly or transposed a couple of letters?

Editing this.....I think I answered my own question, spelled it correctly and the elves made a link. Now let's see if they are smarter than the average elves and can correct my spelling.

This message was edited Jan 18, 2004 12:16 AM

They're smart, but not smart enough to make up for my poor spelling or typing.

What other tricks can they do? :-)

This message was edited Jan 18, 2004 12:20 AM

No elves, just good programming. :) It's a little regular expression match that converts hyperlinks into clickables. It works for email addresses, too, like dave@standardout.com.

:)

so that's what happened! I responded to someone's question but couldn't remember which forum it was on. I knew the address so just added that in my post and after I sent it, voila, there was the link! Oh, wow, I thought, that was cool but how did it happen? Now I know! :)

Hey, Head Elf -- err -- Dave, could you please add parentheses to the URL filter? I posted a URL which, for gosh knows what reason, the site used a parenthesis character in their addresses, and it made a hyperlink of everything up to the parenthesis, then left the rest as a looooong text string which made the column over a page width wide. Edited that one!

This message was edited Jan 20, 2004 1:05 AM

Sigh... Parenthesis are illegal in URLs, for good reason. What if I want to mention a URL in parenthesis (like, for example, http://davesgarden.com/) it works great.

I used to include the () in the URL matching regular expression, but took it out when it broke a LOT of folks's posts, because people like to use parenthesis in their posts around hyperlinks.

The site should stop using that. Instead of ( they should use %28 and instead of ) they should use %29. You could fix it for them by replacing the () with the characters shown. That's valid HTTP and the site should be using that instead.

Dave

See, here's a url in which I replaced the open and close paranthesis with %28 and %29. You can't tell the difference but the URL is valid and the hyperlink generator works on it.

http://davesgarden.com/%28paran%29and%20a%20space.html

Put your mouse over it and see what it is.

dave