Re: Problems with hyperlinked files

["Jan Böcker" <jan.boecker@jboecker.de>]

On 24.03.2010 04:45, Leo Alekseyev wrote:

> Actually, it's right there in section 4.3 of the manual, last
> sentence: "if you need to remove ambiguities about the end of the
> link, enclose them in angular brackets. "
> 
Ah, I see -- this seems to be meant for the use case you mention below,
pasting in a URL without a description.

>> You do not have to protect spaces, because the URL is surrounded by the
>> square brackets. I could only insert angle brackets into a link by
>> editing it manually; when you edit a link with C-c C-l and enclose the
>> URL in angle brackets, Org will automatically remove them.
> 
> Thanks, both these methods work -- although I still think it would be
> nice if org mode could properly handle angle brackets inside square
> ones; the motivation here is that often I just paste in file paths
> instead of  using C-c C-l, and then I have to use angle brackets to
> deal w/ spaces; if I later want to change it to an annotated link, it
> would be nice not to have to strip the angle brackets before wrapping
> it in square ones...

Wouldn't you change it to an annotated link using C-c C-l anyway, which
would strip the square brackets for you? (C-c C-l can also edit existing
links, not only insert new ones.)


I looked at the code of org-open-at-point, and believe I can at least
explain the current behaviour (but I have no idea how a clean/elegant
fix would look):

- Org notices it is in a bracket link, say [[<file:~/s b.txt>]][test]]
- the link variable in org-open-at-point is set to "<file:~/s b.txt>"
- after expanding the ~ abbreviation, it is set to "<file:/home/jan/s b.txt"
- this string is not an absolute path, so it checks if
org-link-re-with-space3 matches, which is defined as follows:

"<?\\(http\\|https\\|ftp\\|mailto\\|file\\|news\\|shell\\|elisp\\|file\\+sys\\|file\\+emacs\\|bbdb\\|bibtex\\|docview\\|gnus\\|info\\|irc\\|mew\\|mhe\\|rmail\\|vm\\|wl\\|id\\):\\([^]

 <> ][^	
 ]*\\)"

Notice the optional < at the beginning? This regexp matches, and
captures "file" as the link type. Now Org takes the rest of the link,
"/home/jan/a b.txt>", and tries to open a non-existing file.


I assume angle brackets are not meant to be supported in bracket links,
because they are not needed there and are stripped by C-c C-l, but only
Carsten would know what the intended behaviour is here.


- Jan