tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (underscores in URLs)

geraldedgar comments on "underscores in URLs" (15370)

geraldedgar — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 05:42:38 -0700

@Kevin: My word processor on its own is likely to change quotation marks and hyphens to non-ASCII things (unless I have done some incantation to prevent that).

Kevin Buzzard comments on "underscores in URLs" (15365)

Kevin Buzzard — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:01:13 -0700

@geraldedgar: even though I'm British, I _never_ use the UK Pound symbol in an email, for precisely this reason: as far as I am concerned, $ is OK but pound is not, because it's not one of the "blessed 256" or whatever :-) And there, above the 3 on my keyboard, there is a pound sign, but I am too scared to touch it!

geraldedgar comments on "underscores in URLs" (15364)

geraldedgar — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:58:14 -0700

As time passes, there are fewer and fewer "old timers" who know what ASCII is, and thus more and more people who name their web pages in non-ASCII ways, leading to questions like this.

Emil J comments on "underscores in URLs" (15354)

Emil J — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:12:14 -0700

A hyphen is not a problem either: Batalin-Vilkovisky algebra. The problem with the original URL is that it is not a hyphen but an en-dash, which is not an ASCII character and therefore needs to be percent-encoded (as %E2%80%93): Batalin–Vilkovisky algebra.

Kevin Walker comments on "underscores in URLs" (14892)

Kevin Walker — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:25:06 -0700

Thanks for fixing it. In hindsight, I should have looked at the tips and tricks page first.

an_mo_user comments on "underscores in URLs" (14891)

an_mo_user — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:14:20 -0700

The solution is to replace the hyphen (-) by %2D. In this case the underscore is no problem

More generally, some information on potential problems and how to resolve them with URLs is to be found in the Tips&Tricks see http://mathoverflow.net/tips point 7.

I took the liberty to test what I said above; so it is fixed on main already.

ADDED: In view of Emil J recent comment, it seems the explanation is incorrect. Though, what I did/suggested happened to work, for reasons I can guess but do not know.

Kevin Walker comments on "underscores in URLs" (14890)

Kevin Walker — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:25:31 -0700

I'm having trouble creating a link with a URL that contains an underscore:

[this Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batalin–Vilkovisky_algebra)

Any ideas of how to make this work?