[Wikipedia-l] Re: URL followed by punctuation->broken link

Sat Jul 27 13:59:35 UTC 2002

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>That seems to be a growing consensus.  The remaining questions,
>then, are the exact details.  Exactly which characters do we want
>to consider "punctuation", and under what circumstances?  My
>suggestion is this: After parsing URLs the way it does now, if the
>URL ends with one, and exactly one, of the characters period, comma,
>question mark, or exclamation; then remove that character and
>assume it punctuates the sentence. Otherwise, leave the URL alone.

There's also the endings ".)", "?)", "!)", and "...".
Getting too complicated?  I agree.

So the rule should be a string of *any* length at the end of a URL
consisting of characters that (should shouldn't be hard to determine)
aren't commonly used to end a URL.
Annoying if you want to site <http://www.com/page.html?secretcode=*%.)?!@>?
Yes, but that's going to be an extremely rare occurrence,
and anybody that does that will know that they have a weird little URL
and will check the <Preview> if they're not a fool.
In contrast, everybody and their mother is going to write
"(For more information, see http://www.com/moreinfo.html.)",
at least while they're newbies.

-- Toby Bartels
   <toby+wikipedia-l at math.ucr.edu>