Mending broken links to URLs

[Jonetc15]

GoSeigen has helped me by mending URLs from time to time on the Technical Analysis board. Please could someone very kindly tell me how to recognise a broken link and then how to fix it.

I do in fact check my posts in Preview and have tested links, which work OK, but then a fault occurs when I post my message.

TIA

Jon

[mc2fool]

The most common (albeit not the only) reason for failed links is just pasting ones with "unusual" characters into the text of the post and phpBB (the board software) deciding that one of those isn't part of a URL and so stopping it before that character.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film) -- note how it hasn't included the closing parenthesis in the link, which will as a result fail.

If, however, you put the URL inside URL tags, like [url]link[/url], then it works. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film)

You can enter the URL tags manually or by clicking the URL button in the toolbar above the text area when you are composing the post. However, I find it surprising that you have links that work in Preview but not when posted. I've never seen that happen.

[Gengulphus]

I've had a look on the Technical Analysis board and found a case where GoSeigen had helped Jonetc15 with this. The link concerned in that case is https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/pnf. ... PWTBDANRNO[PA][D][F1!3!!!2!20] and putting url tags around it doesn't solve the problem - you just get [url]https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/pnf.php?c=ISF.L,PWTBDANRNO[PA][D][F1!3!!!2!20][/url]. I presume one or more of the uses of matched square brackets in the link disrupts the phpBB software's tag-matching algorithm, causing the url and /url tags to fail to be matched up to each other or to anything else, with the result that they just appear as-is in the displayed post.

The fix that does cure it is to replace each opening square bracket in the link by [ (including the semicolon - it's not just punctuation I've added, but is part of the fix) and each closing square bracket by ] (again, including the semicolon): https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/pnf. ... 2!20]

GoSeigen did more to it than that, using url tags to make the link smaller and friendlier, but as far as I can tell, the replacement of the square brackets is all that is actually needed.

I checked for the link working in preview while writing this, but didn't observe that happening for anything but the last link. So here goes on actually posting it... (Edit: And the last link still works when actually posted, so I haven't observed a case of working in preview but not when actually posted... Jonetc15, as you probably know more about when you observed the problem, please try to identify a case of a link that worked in preview for you but not when actually posted.)

Gengulphus

[chas49]

A more user-friendly method is to use the tool at http://lemonfoolfinancialsoftware.weebl ... ormat.html

Interestingly it replaced the square brackets with different codes but still works

%5B and %5D for [ and]

https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/pnf. ... !!!2!20%5D