In the thread at http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/576/ Karolina tried to provide a URL link that included the characters “[” and “]”. this caused a problem with creating a proper page link. I tried to use the URL encoded entities % 5B and % 5D (no spaces) to replace those characters, and make a functional link, but it, too, did not work. I’ve got one more idea to try (using actual HTML to form the link), but I don’t know if it will work. This is an issue that I feel to be of great importance.

Thanks for reporting this Dave. I also tried the hex code but ExpressionEngine changes them back to [ and ]. And because those symbols are also used in the forum markup language I am not surprised that it causes a problem.

I replaced Karolina’s link with a bit.ly link: http://bit.ly/oy6NqD

Do you think this is a good workaround? I do think that ExpressionEngine should leave the hex codes alone so one can use % 5B etc, but if the author of the post is going to be replacing special characters with hex codes anyway it is easier to make a bit.ly link.

There was actually another problems with Karolina’s link. It also contained several spaces, including the word “chatbot”  with spaces around it. This is automatically replaced with a link to the http://www.chatbots.org/chatbot page. So if there weren’t any square brackets in the URL at least the spaces would have had to be replaced with % 20

Yes, I was aware of that issue as well, but at least that one is easily fixed with either % 20 (as you mentioned), or with the + character, either of which can be used as a “work-around”. Having run afoul of this problem a few other times (most notably on certain wikipedia links), I’ve gotten pretty good at “making links work”, but this was the first instance where all of my efforts have proved useless.