History of 2024-02-26 A simple trick with URL parsing in plain text emails

2024-02-26
17:48 UTC Revision 1 . . . . mborkToday I only have a very short tip I thought up a few days ago. If you sometimes send URL via emails (like me), and you absolutely hate HTML emails (like me), there is a common and annoying problem. If the URL you send is the last thing in a sentence, and you want to be correct and end that sentence with a period (or other punctuation), a lot of email clients will treat that punctuation as part of the URL, and of course such “modified” URL won’t work for the recipient. I usually solved that by putting a space between the URL and the period – not 100% correct, but I could live with that. A few days ago it occurred to me that there is another, slightly hackish way to solve my issue. From now on I’m using a hash instead of a space. Assuming that the website I link to doesn’t have any element with the id~ of a period (or any other weird thing like an exclamation mark, of a period followed by a closing parenthesis etc.), the punctuation will be ignored by the browser, but I won’t need to put any space before the end-sentence period. You’re welcome!