Wrong percent-encoding of unreserved characters

[DamienCassou]

Currently, Markdown percent-encodes unreserved characters. For example, this markdown expression:

[Pillar](http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Pier/Pillar)

generates

<a href="http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/%7EPier/Pillar">Pillar</a>

As you can see, the ~ has been percent-encoded to %7E. Even if this works fine on at least Firefox, this won't work on Chrome:

Click me to verify (works on Firefox 29, does not work on Chromium 34.0.1847.116).

The Percent-encoding page on Wikipedia explains that

For maximum interoperability, URI producers are discouraged from percent-encoding unreserved characters.

On the contrary, the markdown 1.0.1 command-line utility produces the expected, non percent-encoded, HTML:

<a href="http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Pier/Pillar">Pillar</a>

[bkeepers]

/cc @mdiep

[DamienCassou]

Any news?

[mdiep]

That link seems to work fine in Chrome 36.0.1985.143.

[bkeepers]

I can confirm that the link works for me as well. Let us know if it doesn't work for you.

[Mouvedia]

@bkeepers please reopen.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt section 2.3
reproduced on iPad 2 safari 7 (537.51.1) and 45.0.2448.0 chrome canary

In the meantime using <a href=""></a> directly is a quick fix.

[BigEd]

I've just been hit by this. Our markdown contains ~, and the HTML contains %7E. Of three browsers tested, two send the %7E to the server and the other url-decodes to ~ before sending. This obscured what was going on. The server then failed to url-decode the %7E. Arguably the server is wrong. But even so, according to the latest applicable RFC, tilde is unreserved, and "Unreserved characters can be escaped without changing the semantics of the URI, but this should not be done unless the URI is being used in a context that does not allow the unescaped character to appear." (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt)
The link in question was IBM 5110 Emulator which for me works with Chrome, not with Firefox and not with Safari.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Mouvedia]

further activity

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.