Mac OS X’s Mail: URLs followed by period

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
July 10th, 2003 • 6:26 pm

Mac OS X’s Mail frequently has a problem with URLs in plain text messages. It detects them automatically (when they start with the protocol, i.e. “http://”, etc.) and turns them INTO “live” links that can be clicked on.

If, however, the URL happens to be the last thing in a sentence and is immediately followed by a period (.), then for some reason the period is highlighted as well as part of the link (even though it isn’t). And clicking on the link results in an error in the browser, since it tried to access a URL that doesn’t exist (the URL that exists plus the period).

It is obviously an error in the algorithm that detects the URLs in plain text mail messages. I have rarely ever seen URLs that end with a period, so it’s highly inappropriate for the algorithm to assume that the period is part of the URL by default.

[This item was submitted to Apple through the Bug Reporter page.]


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