Link URLs being truncated

[Carol the Dabbler]

I tried to use the link to a Google Maps view of Bart's Hospital in this post, but ended up at St. Batholomew's Church on the banks of the Allegheny instead.  Turns out that the end of the link's URL has been chopped off.  I attempted to repair it, but with no success.  The link in my original post still works, so I assumed the problem might have something to do with the link being inside a quote box, and tried to repost the link (not in a quote box) here, but again it was truncated.

 

Can anyone provide other examples of this problem?  Or examples of recent links that DO work?  Thanks!

 

[Arcadia]

All I can tell you is the truncated ones DO take me to St. Bart's ... in Silver Spring, MD. I haven't noticed any other problems with links, I think.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

It appears that link is taking people to a St. Bart's near them whether that be London or one of the various buildings with that name in the US.

[Carol the Dabbler]

That's because the link merely tells Google to show "Saint Bartholomew," rather than my original "Saint Bartholomew's Hospital in London".  Most URLs are way shorter than that, so the forum would presumably post them intact.

 

This reminds me of the days when computer memory was expensive, so programmers would ask themselves, for example, "Well, how long could a person's name actually be?"  And they'd allocate that many characters -- meaning that any name longer than they'd imagined would automatically get its tail chopped off.

 

Tim, any idea if this has something to do with the new software?

 

Added:  Of course, it's possible to get around the problem by using Google Maps' short-URL option.  But it'd be nice if the full-length ones still worked -- or failing that, if the posting software gave a warning, as it does when you try to post too many smileys or an unsupported image extension.

 

[Undead Medic]

I think I have fixed the URL. The problem is that the original URL contained an apostrophe (quote), which is the standard means in HTML of enclosing the URL's destination when creating links on a page. The result is that the software incorrectly misinterprets an apostrophe within a URL as defining the end of the URL to be parsed... If that makes sense.

 

Remove the apostrophe and bingo, it works as expected.

[Carol the Dabbler]

That is odd -- it worked just fine when I first posted it -- guess the forum software has a new parsing routine.  So it wasn't the overall length after all.  Whaddaya know.

 

Thanks, Tim!