Round bracket breaks hyperlink parsing

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1

Once you’ve done the above, delete everything above this line.

A URL containing an opening bracket (very rare, but possible) like:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3187902/customising-default-columns-in-file-explorer-(win

will break at the opening bracket inside Obsidian (I’m talking about the “natural” http link parsing, without any []() nor [[]] link syntax).

A closing bracket has the same effect.

The workaround is to encode them as %28 and %29 respectively.

I tried Typora as a comparison and it supported it.

But this very place (Discourse Markdown viewer) doesn’t support it: Customising default columns in File Explorer (Win 10) - Microsoft Q&A(win

So maybe it’s just not part of the standard?

Another workaround is to wrap the URL using the [label](url) syntax… but it will only work for opening brackets. Closing brackets will close the url too early. In this case, only %29 is reliable.

I suppose that because of this incompatibility with the label-hyperlink syntax, %28 and %29 encoding are always preferable… It would be nice to find a way to configure my browser to always replace () with %28%29 as they generally do with spaces and %20, at least when copying URL, but I don’t see such an option.

Ironically, on this thread I found browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy which does exactly the opposite…

Steps to reproduce

Copy https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3187902/customising-default-columns-in-file-explorer-(win to a sandbox vault page and look at its hyperlink color.

You can try to click on it to open the link, but in this particular case, the Microsoft website only cares about the thread number so it will look like it worked but it just recreated the thread name from the number… It really stopped parsing the URL before the bracket.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

Y

Expected result

Parse the full hyperlink
(I suppose, unless the standard is to break at bracket and Typora is the one overdoing it)

Actual result

Link parsing stops before bracket

Environment

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.9.12
Installer version: v1.7.7
Operating system: Windows 11 Home 10.0.26100
Login status: not logged in
Language: en
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 0
Plugins enabled: 0

RECOMMENDATIONS:
none

Additional information

There may be annoying side effects to this like people writing comments in brackets after a URL and forgetting a space, getting the bracket swallowed into the URL.

It is also very rare and while Typora supports it, even Discourse doesn’t.

So I won’t mind too much if this is not supported. I’d like to have some tool to fix special character encoding either from browser side or when pasting in Obsidian though. For now it’s rare enough that I can fix it manually.

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According to the CommonMark spec which Obsidian’s Markdown ultimately derives from, a “link destination” can include parentheses “only if (a) they are backslash-escaped or (b) they are part of a balanced pair of unescaped parentheses” (CommonMark Spec). That spec also doesn’t autolink bare URLs (CommonMark Spec), but I imagine it might follow the same rule if it did. GitHub Flavored Markdown, Obsidian’s immediate ancestor (which is based on CommonMark), does autolink bare URLs but doesn’t mention parentheses in that section so presumably follows the same rules (GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec).

I edited the post to make the example URL visible, and put a copy of the unprotected version with the mention of the forum not supporting it.

3

Angle brackets work for you?

<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3187902/customising-default-columns-in-file-explorer-(win>
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