Does anyone know why links that end with a ) turn out like the following when sent through an IM to someone?:

http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Angel_(TV_Series)


And I posted this in the scripting section because I'm having my script sometimes send such links, and was hoping someone here may know how to fix this problem.

instead of using ( or ) literally, you should encode them... This because ( and ) are actually reserved characters.

http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Angel_%28TV_Series%29

( => %28
) => %29

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

This encoding can be done in JScript with the escape() function.

In fact, encoding should always be done when you send URLs which you don't know what they'll be, in any program.

Hmm...it's not very aesthetically pleasing with the percentages in the URL. Is that the only way you know of?

A short URL:

http://bit.ly/aEPXZM

A customized short URL:

http://bit.ly/Angel-TV-Series

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
( => %29
) => %29

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Originally posted by matty

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
( => %29
) => %29

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Cookie fail... both parenthesis do not have the same value. It is:
( => %28
) => %29

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Originally posted by macgyver08
Hmm...it's not very aesthetically pleasing with the percentages in the URL. Is that the only way you know of?

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The "escape" method shouldn't be used for this though:

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Originally posted by JScript docs > escape method
Note
The escape method should not be used to encode Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). Use encodeURI and encodeURIComponent methods instead.

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Originally posted by Eljay
Unfortunately, using encodeURI doesn't encode parentheses (it appears JScript 5.6 is older than the latest RFC about URIs ) so it doesn't really help.

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