My URLs Are Showing Hyphens As %2D

[Todd Temple]

I have coded the links as <a href="http://domain.com/link-to-file/">Link</a> but the domains display in the browser as http://domain.com/link%2Dto%2Dfile/. Why is this happening? Here is a link to the site in question.

LINK-
http://www.madiganperio.com/

[Dan Grossman]

I don't see that on your site.

http://www.madiganperio.com/about-us/dr-madigan/

lots of dashes, no mis-encoding

[gary.turner]

Just taking a wild guess: It appears you're using MSFT Office to generate the pages. (MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub) In that case, the character encoding is probably windows-1252. That encoding uses values that are invalid on the web, e.g. hyphens, single and double "curly" quotes. My guess is that Office escapes those invalid characters as valid ASCII/ANSI entities. I didn't spot any of those invalid characters (they're not invalid within their declared set) in the body of the page.

Blowing my whole theory out of the water is the page's http-equiv charset utf-8. :shrug: So, there's the SWAG.

cheers,

gary

[boymc]

it is the same as / = &#37;2F
no problem with it.
You can instead "-" = "_" to avoid it.

[Todd Temple]

Just taking a wild guess: It appears you're using MSFT Office to generate the pages. (MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub) In that case, the character encoding is probably windows-1252. That encoding uses values that are invalid on the web, e.g. hyphens, single and double "curly" quotes. My guess is that Office escapes those invalid characters as valid ASCII/ANSI entities. I didn't spot any of those invalid characters (they're not invalid within their declared set) in the body of the page.

Blowing my whole theory out of the water is the page's http-equiv charset utf-8. :shrug: So, there's the SWAG.

cheers,

gary

It must be the web host that is using MSFT Office Web Server, not me. I steer clear of Microsoft products. What if I were to change the character encoding to this instead of UTF-8?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

Would that fix my problem or would it create a whole new set of problems to fix?

Todd

[gary.turner]

Like Dan, I'm not seeing the escaped hyphens. Were it me, I wouldn't worry about it as long I were saving as utf-8, and had my meta http-equiv set to utf-8.

cheers,

gary

[Todd Temple]

Thats really weird!!!!!

I just tried the same site in Firefox and clicking on the navigation link for "Forms and Support" shows this URL in the address bar:
http://www.madiganperio.com/forms-and-support/faq/

The same link from Safari is displayed below:
http://www.madiganperio.com/forms%2Dand%2Dsupport/faq/

Why would it do this?

That is really weird...

[Dafmeister]

Did you find a solution to this? I have the same problem and it appears only in Safari. It's not a huge problem but it looks messy. The web page still validates as far as I can see.

Daf

[xhtmlcoder]

URL encoding replaces the unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set. I suspect it's actually the server.

[Todd Temple]

Did you find a solution to this? I have the same problem and it appears only in Safari. It's not a huge problem but it looks messy. The web page still validates as far as I can see.

Daf

Yes, and XHTMLCODER was on the right track. I had to contact the web hosting provider and they did something on their end. Not sure what, by they were able to fix it in minutes. Hope this helps!