The discussion Permalinks & special html characters revolves around francis_exalate trying to enter permalinks with special characters, such as < and >, into a Discourse site. The issue arises when these characters are double HTML encoded, resulting in a 404 page not found error.
francis_exalate has tried various methods, including escaping characters with a backslash (\), but to no avail. Jagster and pfaffman have suggested possible solutions, such as using Rails to control the escaping or using a link shortening service like TinyURL. However, francis_exalate is using the hosting option of Discourse.org and cannot use Rails.
Lilly has successfully created a test permalink, but francis_exalate is trying to use a complex link with special characters as the permalink. pfaffman suggests making a permalink normalization to remove everything before the > character, which might resolve the issue.
francis_exalate has provided a page with an overview of all the use cases, showing the URL-encoded links. pfaffman thinks that most URLs should work fine, and Lilly is currently looking for a solution. francis_exalate has offered to provide a text file with the original URLs, which might help resolve the issue.
Of course - people who try to access today the first version, will arrive at the discourse site, and get a 404. That’s why we want to use the permalinks feature
The problem is that it is not possible to enter the url in such a way that it is found and thus the redirect doesn’t kick in.
A tinyurl will not be possible because that is not what the users will be using.
edit: nevermind, I wasn’t comprehending your OP properly, I see what you are trying to do now. you are tying to use that weird complex link as the permalink. yikes. yea I don’t know if that is possible without some special escaping.
I think the rest have a greater than and everything after the greater than is plain characters. So you can make the permalink strip out the first part up to the greater than and it’ll Just Work.
