"Unlinked Note" - Create link has weird behaviour when the unlinked keyword is in a URL

Bug graveyard
1

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a Note with a URL, e.g. https://rancher.com/blog/2020/rancher-vs-Openshift/
  2. Create a second note called like a word from that url, e.g. “Openshift”
  3. Search for “Unlinked mentions”. The URL within the first note shows up. Klick on “Link”
  4. The URL in the first note is rewritten as https://rancher.com/blog/2020/rancher-vs-[[Openshift]]/
  5. The note is still shown as unlinked, since the [] brackets are not recognized as an internal link. Press on “Link” a second time.
  6. The URL is rewritten as https://rancher.com/blog/2020/rancher-vs-[[[[Openshift]]]]/
  7. Repeat multiple times, each time the Keyword in the URL has another pair of [] brackets added

Expected result

The URL should not be recognized as an unlinked mention, therefore Obsidian will not wrap the keyword in the URL into multiple [] brackets.

Actual result

Each click on “Link” creates another pair around the already bracketed Keyword

https://rancher.com/blog/2020/rancher-vs-[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[Openshift]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]/

Environment

  • Operating system: Windows 10
  • Obsidian version: 0.9.11

Additional information

2

You should not click link becouse it doesn’t make sense to link to an url.
We are leaving this to the user discretion when to link or not. Open a feature request if you want

3

Seems like this is a scenario for aliases [[some note link|some url]] or for custom markdown links.

4

“You should not…”
Well, then, why is Obsidian suggesting me to link it? It isn’t always transparent if an unlinked suggestion is an URL. If i should not do something because it will break something, why doesn’t the software prevent me to do this? Since Obsidian is able to recognize a URL as a URL, it shouldn’t be too hard to not show a “Link” button next to a nonlinked mention which is a URL?

But since Obsidian is also suggesting me to link an unlinked mention which is part of a tag, which will break the tag link…maybe the suggestion to link an unlinked mention should get some pre-filtering instead of just suggesting everything to be linked.

In my opinion as a hobby software developer, a “you should not do something which causes a bug” is not preferrable to “implement something to handle the edge case which causes the bug to occur, e.g. the software being used by a dumb user”

1 Like
5

I am sorry if I came across as rude. What I meant is that we let to the user discretion what to link. This is a design desition at the moment. Covering all the corner cases will add a complexity to the unlinked mention parser we are not sure we are willing to add.
You can open a feature request for this.

1 Like
6