Re: link syntax fixing bug?

[Maxim Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 21/03/2021 05:46, Samuel Wales wrote:
> the issue is that when i click on google, the space before "hi" does
> not show up in the earch box.  ergo, different results.
> 
> *** should be orig
> [[http://www.google.com/search?q=%7E%22retroactive%20whatever%22%20%22hi%22][retro
> original]]
> *** should be fixed, is not?
> [[http://www.google.com/search?q=~"retroactive whatever" "hi"][retro
> original]]

Reading Kyle's response, I have realized that you might have unsafe URL 
handler. I hope, I am wrong. To factor out some excessively smart JS, I 
tried

     firefox 'http:/127.0.0.1/search?q=~"retroactive whatever" "hi"'

and I got expected result in the URL bar. With the following test script 
"fake-browser"

#!/bin/sh
exec kdialog --title "Fake Browser" --msgbox "Args $#: '$*'"

and a some customization:

  '(browse-url-browser-function (quote browse-url-generic))
  '(browse-url-generic-program "fake-browser")

I did not get any white space problem for the following link

[[http:/127.0.0.1/search?q=~"retroactive whatever" "hi"][retro-original]]

So neither passing URL to handler nor handling URL by firefox cause a 
problem.

However protecting spaces in URLs from `org-fill-paragraph' function was 
mentioned  in mail list archive as one of the reasons to introduce 
second pass of percent encoding. Double percent encoding is clearly a 
problem since there is no way to reliably guess whether second pass was 
applied or not. My impression, it were not a problem if just "offensive" 
for org symbols "][ \" would be replaced by percent-encoded equivalent 
in URLs. Maybe I just missed cases when mixing percent-encoded and 
unicode characters leads to some problem, so I believe it is safe. My 
hypotesis is that replacing just "[", "]", and "\" to percent encoded 
equivalent in any URL does not cause any issue, web-servers are able to 
decode them (selective encoding, not second pass for whole URL). Maybe 
file links on windows is an exception.

My opinion is that `org-lint' gives false positives for URLs with 
percent encoded characters. They are rather wide spread e.g. in search 
queries.

> *** [[https://orgmode.org/Changes.html][Org mode for Emacs – Release notes]]
> The following function will help switching your links to the new syntax:
> 
> (defun org-update-link-syntax (&optional no-query)
...
>        (while (re-search-forward "\\[\\[[^]]*?%\\(?:2[05]\\|5[BD]\\)" nil t)

I believe, the logic at least for space symbol (%20) should be more 
sophisticated. Maybe decoding of URLs with "%20" should be performed 
only if decoded URL still contains percent-encoded characters. Maybe 
decoding should be prevented if any of characters mandatory for percent 
encoding ("[]?/", etc) is present besides percent-encoded sequences. 
Maybe the only way is interactive comparison of original and decoded URL.

I do not think that particular example you provided

http://www.google.com/search?q=%7E%22retroactive%20whatever%22%20%22hi%22

needs decoding. It is not human friendly but it is more safe and quite 
wide spread. On the other hand, decoded variant should not lead to any 
problem as well unless something is misconfigured

[[http://www.google.com/search?q=~"retroactive whatever" "hi"][retro 
original]]