[img] with filenames including '&' character

yoxi

I tried embedding an inline image in a post, but all I got was the line of code instead of the image. Then I took the '&' out of the filename and it worked (once I'd taken it out of the linked filename as well, of course...)

example: [img]http://www.yoxi.net/anitya/f&r.jpg[/img]

If I took the & out, you'd see this image, but you should see it anyway, they're both available!

Has the forum never supported filenames containing ampersands, or is this something from the latest upgrade? I uses ampersands quite regularly in image names, and I'm sure this has never come up before.

- padmavyuha

pluby

yoxi · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 11:16 am Post subject:

No, it's specific to this forum software - I've just tested the same img string over at forums.machtech.com and it works fine with the ampersand in.

- padmavyuha

pluby · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 11:46 am Post subject:

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4574

yoxi · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:03 pm Post subject:

Oh, okay, sorry - I was assuming their forum software was handling the ampersand more intelligently, rather than just ignoring it!

I am surprised this hasn't cropped up here before, as I do tend to use ampersands in filenames. Time to migrate to plusses, I suppose - funny, because I got out of the plus habit years ago when some system I was using at work didn't like filenames with plusses in them.

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

- padmavyuha

pluby · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:03 pm Post subject:

<img>

yoxi · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:09 pm Post subject:

pluby · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:26 pm Post subject:

I was trying out using the HTML "img" tag as a workaround as the bad news is that the phpNuke software's tag search and replace code apparently gets confused by the "&" in an "img" block and using the HTML "img" tag does not work either.

I tried to see if there was an obvious place in the phpNuke code that I could change to fix this, but I found none. So, unfortunately, this is just a limitation that we are stuck with.

Patrick

yoxi · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:27 pm Post subject:

Meh - Mohammed, mountain... Smile

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4574

Et voilà:

So, the solution seems to be to %-encode/escape the ampersand.

(UnicodeChecker's service would be lovely at this, except it believes that an & doesn't need to be %-escaped. Razz

I had to manually look up the hex for &, since it's not one of the 5 or so hex values I remember off the top of my head.)

As a side note, you also need to %-escape any unescaped UTF-8 URLs you copy from the wiki, e.g. any of the pages whose titles contain French accent grave ou accent aigu, or you won't be able to make URLs out of them here.

Smokey

pluby

yoxi · Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 12:56 am Post subject:

Thanks, that's useful to know. For those of you watching in black & white, the code to replace an ampersand in a URL is %26, so in my img link, f&r.jpg should be f%26r.jpg instead.

- padmavyuha

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4574

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 1:14 am Post subject:

I'll take a look at the php and see if anything stands out. It also may be something with the encoding used by the database where, after the upgrade, something is expecting unicode vs. utf8 or something. I think the new code being stricter is a better possibility though.

ed