First sorry for the late response, some pressing family matters kept me busy last week. At Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:29:06 -0500, Nick Dokos wrote: > No, I mean the handling in org-insert-link itself: > > line 9048 says > > (setq link (org-extract-attributes > (org-link-unescape (org-match-string-no-properties 1)))) This is step 4: Org reads a bracket link from the buffer and these links are expected to be escaped (step 2). The unescape restores the original link. > but further down, on line 9114 the link is not unescaped: > > (setq link > (let ((org-completion-use-ido nil) > (org-completion-use-iswitchb nil)) > (org-completing-read > "Link: " > (append > (mapcar (lambda (x) (list (concat x ":"))) > all-prefixes) > (mapcar 'car org-stored-links)) > nil nil nil > 'tmphist > (car (car org-stored-links))))) Here we read the user's input and provide completion for stored links and registered link types. There's no need to unescape the link, we assume that whatever the user enters here is the link in its normal form. In both cases the minibuffer contains a link in its normal form. In the first case obtaining the normal form requires unescaping because whatever the user enters in the minibuffer is escaped once before written to buffer. To make things a little bit clearer lets look into the specs (RFC3986): #+begin_quote 2.4. When to Encode or Decode Under normal circumstances, the only time when octets within a URI are percent-encoded is during the process of producing the URI from its component parts. This is when an implementation determines which of the reserved characters are to be used as subcomponent delimiters and which can be safely used as data. Once produced, a URI is always in its percent-encoded form. #+end_quote In other words: Steps 2 and 4, escaping and unescaping when a link is written to or read from the buffer has nothing to do with percent-escaping of URIs. Org just happens to use the percent-escaping algorithm to store a link in the buffer and encode special chars (i.e. brackets). After reading the specs I'm quite confident that dropping the percent-escaping of HTTP links in `org-open-at-point' is the right thing to do: If you paste a URI from the browser or enter it manually Org does not *produce* the URI and therefor is not responsible for proper escaping or unescaping. I think we should remove the percent-escaping in `org-open-at-point' after 7.8 was released and see if this works out without breaking to many links. Best, -- David -- OpenPGP... 0x99ADB83B5A4478E6 Jabber.... dmjena@jabber.org Email..... dmaus@ictsoc.de