Link that breaks make_clickable()

“Real spaces” where? This is not copied out of email, nor typed it is a real, working URL (on the Michigan State legislature’s website). And I don’t see any spaces in it, encoded or converted or otherwise.

I may not have made the issue clear. It’s that when I feed this URL to the WP function make_clickable(), the function returns the URL with only an initial part of it “clickable” (hyperlinked).

It closes the hyperlink somewhere around one of the parentheses that appear in the early part of the URL. Though I’m a newbie at RegEx, this makes me suspect that the opening or closing parenthesis is breaking the RegEx…

<aside>Rather ironically, it classifies ‘(‘ as non-punctuation, while it classifies ‘)’ as punctuation…</aside>

I guess they wanted to avoid including a ‘)’ that closed a pair of brackets surrounding the whole URL. Good idea, but the solution leaves something to be desired… like, accepting the above URL 🙁

I wonder if RegEx can count how many ‘(‘s have occurred, and not let any more than that number of ‘)’s occur? I’m too much of a newbie to know, but that would seem an ideal solution…

Silly me: the problem they were addressing wasn’t how to prevent extra ‘)’s from being included at the end of the URL. They had already addressed that, very specifically, by counting ‘(‘s and ‘)’s in their text-replacing callback function ( _make_url_clickable_cb() ).

But, that leaves me even more puzzled: Having taken care of that problem, WHY shouldn’t they include ) in the list of characters one of which must follow any “punctuation” character? Which fixes the problem with the above URL…

Here’s the place in make_clickable()’s code I’m talking about; the single change I’m suggesting — inserting a ) — is on the next to last line here (sorry for the wordwrap):

[\\w\\x80-\\xff#%\\~/@\\[\\]*(+=&$-]*+         # Non-punctuation URL character
(?:                                            # Unroll the Loop: Only allow puctuation URL character if followed by a non-punctuation URL character
    [\'.,;:!?)]                                # Punctuation URL character
    [\\w\\x80-\\xff#%\\~/@\\[\\]*(+=&$)-]++    # Non-punctuation URL character --PLUS )
)*

Now I’ve got a more efficient and robust RegEx for my improved make_clickable():

$url_clickable = '~
        ([\\s(<.,;:!?])                                        # 1: Leading whitespace, or punctuation
        (                                                      # 2: URL
                [\\w]{1,20}+://                                # Scheme and hier-part prefix
                (?=\S{1,2000}\s)                               # Limit to URLs less than about 2000 characters long

	# here begins a recursive solution, based somewhat on an idea or two from JAN GOYVAERTS:

		[\w\x80-\xff#%\~@\[\]*+=&$-]++			# Non-punctuation URL character -- excluding / HERE ONLY
		(?:
		 [\'.,;:!?]					# punctuation URL character
		  (?![/@])  					# Let us avoid having one of these right after the punctuation
		 [\w\x80-\xff#%\~/@\[\]*+=&$-]++		# Allow punctuation URL character only if followed by a non-punctuation URL character
		)++
		(?:
		 (
		  \(						# Opening round bracket, of a proper pair
		   (?:
		    [\w\x80-\xff#%\~/@\[\]*+=&$-]++		# Non-punctuation URL character -- including /
		    (?:[\'.,;:!?](?![/@])[\w\x80-\xff#%\~/@\[\]*+=&$-]++)*+
		   |
		    (?3)    				# recursive subroutine call
		   )*+
		  \)					# Closing round bracket, of a proper pair
		 )
		 (?:
		  [\w\x80-\xff#%\~/@\[\]*+=&$-]++
		  (?:[\'.,;:!?](?![/@])[\w\x80-\xff#%\~/@\[\]*+=&$-]++)*+
		 )?+
		)*+
        )
# this line is NOW SUPERFLUOUS  (\)?)                    # 3: Trailing closing parenthesis (for parethesis balancing post processing)
# end of recursive solution
# ... BUT, you MUST now use my new, drastically SHORTENED version of the callback function _make_url_clickable_cb(), next ... I call it _my_make_url_clickable_cb() ... ;)
                        ~xS'; // The regex is a non-anchored pattern and does not have a single fixed starting character.
                              // Tell PCRE to spend more time optimizing since, when used on a page load, it will probably be used several times.

                        $ret = preg_replace_callback( $url_clickable, '_my_make_url_clickable_cb', $ret );