[1eyedjack]

I don't know if this is a proprietory browser issue, in which case for the benefit of doubt I am using IE9.


If I email a hyperlinked bookmark to a set of travellers in MyHands, then the link doesn't work.

It saves it as a hyperlink alright, but click on it and it takes me to a page on MyHands that just says "invalid input".

If I save the same link as a "favourite" in my browser page and click on it from there, it DOES take me to the list of travellers.


So my question is: How to email to someone a hyperlink that takes them to the particular tourney travellers?

Here is an example of the sort of link. I don't know whether clicking it from this post will take me to the the "invalid input" page or to the "show hands" page. I will find out in a few seconds and edit this post accordingly. There is nothing interesting about the particular tourny that I have chosen here - I just chose the first one on the list.

http://www.bridgebas...1148-1347081316-


[EDIT] - OK, just tested the above link and it comes up with "Invalid input", being the same result as if emailed

[jandrew]

It is essential to include the hyphen at the end of the link.

You will note that the underline does not extend under the hyphen - showing that it is not included in the link.

Maybe your email is discarding or ignoring the hyphen.

jandrew

[1eyedjack]

Interesting, thanks.

I may have posted it wrong in the forum post above, and purely by accident reproduced the result. In my emails the final hyphen definitely is being included in the hyperlink within the email.

It may be a related issue, however. I cannot work out how to include the hyphen in the hyperlink in the forum post. It is included in the clipboard, but when I paste the clipboard it excludes the hyphen from the hyperlinked extract.

This is from the clipboard

http://www.bridgebas...1148-1347081316-


and this is from clicking on the "insert link" option in the forum software, then pasting the clipboard into that popup

My link


[EDIT] yup that second method works, at least for posting to the forums. Now I just have to try to reproduce this in the email software (using Windows Mail bundled with Vista).
The hyphen IS underlined in the email, BEFORE I send it, but it seems to be excluded by the time it reaches the recipient. You have definitely put me on the right track, thanks

[1eyedjack]

Well, it has me well and truly stumped. I know what the problem is. Just don't know the solution.

Not quite true - I have a workaround: Convert the URL into a TinyURL. Then that gets rid of the final hyphen.

[inquiry]

1eyedjack, on 2012-September-08, 12:27, said:

Well, it has me well and truly stumped. I know what the problem is. Just don't know the solution.

Not quite true - I have a workaround: Convert the URL into a TinyURL. Then that gets rid of the final hyphen.

Try adding the traveller hyperlink to an excel spread sheet... that way, you can keep notes about the hand, in other cells, including the player names, contract, score, etc at your table. You can then just click on the traveller hyperlink to see the hand. Not this is not a good solution for complete records, since the hyperlink becomes in active in a couple of months... but you should be able to email multiple travellers that way.

[jandrew]

I don't have your problem.

I have copied the address from the address box on the webpage and sent it by email.
The "sent" copy of the email included the hyphen.
The "received" copy of the email also included the email.
Both link to the tourney results page.
No problem.

I shall paste the address below.
http://www.bridgebas...325-1346957974-

It looks ok before I send this reply.
I will check after it has gone.

jandrew

[Edit] And it looks OK after my reply appears on the forum.

[barmar]

The issue here is that when you simply paste a hyperlink into plain text, the software has to use heuristics (i.e. "guess") to figure out where the end of the URL is. I've seen poorly written software that got confused if a URL was put inside parentheses or at the end of a sentence -- it thought the close parenthesis or period was part of the URL! So a common heuristic is to assume that the URL ends with a letter, number, or one of the punctuation characters that are special in URL syntax, like '?', '/', '&', and '#'. URLs ending in hyphen are pretty unusual, so it's not surprising that they confuse the heuristics.

The solution, as 1eyedjack discovered, is to use an explicit command to enter a link. If you create your email using Rich Text format, the mail program should have a command to insert a link, similar to the forum's. If you're creating plain text, a recommendation is to put the URL inside < > characters, e.g. <http://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/hands.php?tourney=1148-1347081316->, but I don't know how well supported this is by mail readers.

In retrospect it was probably poor to create URLs like this, but it can be hard to anticipate side effects like this.