Is there any way to force URLs with odd special characters in them to behave as links?

I guess something now: bring your weird link to tinyurl.com and paste the tiny url you get instead of it in your post here.
Fuuny thing is, i have the same problem here, and only now that you brought it up i thought of using tinyurl.com myself.
Hope it works though.

Ha! What a great idea, @rebbel That’s just what I’ll do unless the Fluther gurus have a simpler workaround. Thanks.

You are welcome, @ETpro .

Test

There was something with brackets that solved this problem.. Andrew knows.

Edit… Left and right brackets around the entire thing works. But it fails in preview.

[ “Test” : htt p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) ]

Remove spaces.

@johnpowell OUTSTANDING. Much easier than traipsing off to www.tinyurl,com to get a simpler address.

This might also be helpful (in case, for example, your URL contains a closing bracket):

You can percent-encode troublesome characters, that is, you replace each one with a percent sign (”%”) followed by two hexadecimal digits that represent that character. Here are some websites where you can look up the codes or (better yet) automatically convert URLs.

Your URL, for example, contains no illegal characters, but it appears that Fluther doesn’t care for the parentheses. So look up the codes for left (”%28”) and right (”%29”) parentheses, and write the URL as “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29”.* Here it is used in a link: Bicameralism.

I can’t find a way show the URL itself in the more legible form you see in your browser’s address bar. Putting a URL in the quotes of the regular Textile link syntax confuses Fluther, e.g.,

[ “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29 ]

with the spaces removed, is rendered thus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_

Parenthesized items in the quotes are not displayed inline but set the tooltip for the link.

First caveat: Percent-encoding reserved character may break the URL in some cases. Here are the reserved characters:

! * ’ ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? # [ ]

Let’s try it and see what happens. (In both examples below, the pattern I entered was

URL
“URL” : URL

without the spaces around the colon.) Unencoded:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Fluther
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=Fluther

Inappropriately percent-encoded:

http://www.google.com/search%3Fie=UTF-8%26q=Fluther
http://www.google.com/search%3Fie=UTF-8%26q=Fluther

Second caveat: We’re really fighting two problems, the second of which is that the live preview doesn’t work in many cases. I don’t know any way around this except to experiment. (I hope I can edit this once it’s posted.) Good luck.

* Because I put it in quotes here, Fluther doesn’t display it as a link. Here it is again, without them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29

@Dan337 Excellent info. THanks. I was wondering what the Textile parser would do with % encoded characters. Thanks for saving me the trouble of conducting a series of tests.

@ETpro You’re welcome. One more thing I learned while editing my answer is that if one submits and re-edits the same post too many times (it couldn’t have been more than five), Fluther forbids further edits and gives one a snarky “award”. (I suppose it’s cheaper than fixing the bugs.)

@Dan337 LOL. I’m off to get my first snarky award ASAP.

(EDIT) Ha! I’ve already got one!