Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

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•

Greenbank

Here's what 'cat -vet' on a selection of the page source looks like:-

<p>The following URL is manually typed in:-</p>$
$
<p><a href="http://microcosm.app/out/bqgNg" title="facebook.com/groups/regentspar..." rel="nofollow" target="_blank">facebook.com/groups/regentsparkcM-BM--ycling/</a></p>$
$
<p>And clicking on the link works, but if you copy and paste the text into the address bar there's a "soft hyphen" (0xAD or %C2%AD in URL encoding) between the p and a characters that wasn't there originally.</p>$

Note the meta chars "M-BM--" in the middle of the text representation of the URL.

•

Velocio in reply to @Greenbank

Ah right... yes, that is international.

And as you say... clicking on the link works.

The  unicode characters were added after a number of very long URLs were posted and broke the layout of certain long posts (notably the "lists of" links).

Because there is no internal space in a URL no amount of telling CSS to wrap text worked. The only solution was to add a form of zero-width whitespace that would allow browsers to wrap a long and solid URL at certain points. We add a  every 25 chars so that the browser width can be used to wrap at the appropriate point.

As you point out, clicking the link and following the href still works. In fact, the href is the only thing we will ever guarantee to work.

Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

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