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How do I: underscores in URLs

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    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?
    • CommentAuthoran_mo_user
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2011 edited
     
    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.
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    Thanks for fixing it. In hindsight, I should have looked at the tips and tricks page first.
    • CommentAuthorEmil J
    • CommentTimeAug 2nd 2011
     

    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.

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    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.

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    @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!
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    @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).

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