% characters break URL
July 4, 2013 12:00 AM
Hi,
I am building a course for a client that includes several links to pages on the client's intranet. The URLs for those pages contain a single quote/comma character as follows:
/Firm's%20Policies/reporting_policy.htm
When I enter the URL into the hyperlink action dialog box with the above section as-is, I get an error when publishing that the ' is not a valid character, and the URL is dropped completely from the published pages. When I replace the ' in the hyperlink action dialog box with a %27, such that the url comes out as
/Firm%27s%20Policies/reporting_policy.htm
and click the link in the course online, nothing happens (it is supposed to open in a new window, but that window doesn't even open). It seems the %27 is breaking the link, but I can't figure out how. For reference, I am using Lectora X.3.
I'd appreciate any suggestions if anyone has experienced this and found a way around it.
Many thanks!
Discussion (4)
Thanks! I hadn't thought of trying a button vs. a text hyperlink. I'll give that a shot.
Hi there,
We have that issue too - we use a lot of %20 and %26. I've found this issue only happens with text hyperlinks. To avoid this, I just use an invisible button on top of the text I want to hyperlink (important that the button is on top) and change the font to blue underlined (I have a style set just for this purpose). This works like a charm.
Someone told me that there is a setting somewhere where you can prevent Lectora from rendering URL encoding (not sure "render" is the right term, I call it "eating hyperlinks" ;) ) - I'm not sure where that setting is so I just use the button. Also, if you can get rid of the apostrophe in your URL that would probably be good too.
Hello!
Is the link to your client's site an http:// (external) hyperlink? I suppose they won't change the apostrophe in the hyperlink which would be ideal ;)
If you can open the client site with your regular browser - I'd do a stare and compare in the HTML output to see if the published files published the right link.
I did an experiment yesterday to test / troubleshoot functionality of the Lectora 11 regular New Window style, the Lightbox style, and manually JavaScript to open a new window using _blank.
window dot open(http://www.google.com , "toolbar=no, scrollbars=yes, width=800, height=400" , "_blank");
The regular New Window and the JavaScript worked well, but the lightbox window malfunctioned on our LMS (it opens, but when closed, the lighbox background remains - this is on iPad / mobile LMS). I noticed the lightbox style had some null values in the javascript Lectora creates (I have screenshots if anyone wants to see those).
If you are linking to locally published files, try the ./ convention ( ./mywebfile/mylaunchfile.htm )
Good luck - let me know how it goes :)
Hello
I am having this similiar issue but the invisible button didn't work. In the url to their wiki site they have an apostrophe ex. Young's and I get an error because of the apostrophe and it won't work, it won't open the new window to view the link. any resolution?
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