207618 - leading and trailing whitespaces (%20) on URLs break links (flash objects)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Jim Booth]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030523
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030523

Links get trailing %20 appended, which results in 404 errors

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race4/index.shtml
2. click on a city such as LOS ANGELES
3. URL Bar displays:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race4/destinations/episode01/destination01.shtml%20%20
4. Click GO or hit enter
Actual Results:  
Page not found error.  
Delete the %20%20 from the end of the URL and it displays correctly

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should strip the trailing spaces so the link works.
(IE 6 does not display the trailing spaces in the URL, and the link works.)

Opera 7.10 has the problem even worse, it displays the above URL as:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race4/destinations/episode01/destination01.shtml%20%0D%0A%20

Here's another example:
go to http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/
After the flash plays, Click on the purple ABOUT or Be On The Show links in the
bottom left corner.  URL bar displays:
http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/about.shtml%20
and it gives a File Not Found error.  Remove the %20 and it works
(Opera 7.10 does the same this as Mozilla, IE handles it fine)

I think whitespace on the END of a URL is a different case than inside a URL
(which is correctly escaped).  Obviously, this is poor website programming, but
I think we need to handle it.

Comment 1

[Hermann Schwab]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

I didn´t find your link to LosAngeles, not the way you described.
I didn´t get links with trailing spaces.

But I did get this as top line in the browser:
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/poll-taglib-1.0.tld" prefix="poll"%>

Comment 2

[Jim Booth]

Both of these links are from FLASH objects. 
Los Angeles and other city links are in the Flash Map graphic.  

Hermann, I also see the code at the top of the screen. but I don't think that's
related to this problem.

Comment 3

[Hermann Schwab]

->Plug-ins
next try, previous comment was without flash installed.
After installing flash, I see same line a top of browser window.
The links you are talking about are started from the flash, so I think you
should change 'Component' from 'Networking: HTTP' to 'Plug-ins'

Comment 4

[Hermann Schwab]

-> Hermann, I also see the code at the top of the screen. but I don't think that's
related to this problem.

It´s related to the problem, it shows that the guys who made that website don´t
know what is shown in a browser. I assume, in the end it will be a Tech
Evangelism bug, solved by correctly specifying the links in the flash file.

Comment 5

[dipesh]

(In reply to comment #4)
> It´s related to the problem, it shows that the guys who made that website don´t
> know what is shown in a browser. I assume, in the end it will be a Tech
> Evangelism bug, solved by correctly specifying the links in the flash file.
> 
We can not tell the guy who made the website which runs fine in IE to change it
so that it runs in FireFox 0.8. FireFox can truncate leading, trailing spaces.

Goto www.unreal.com which is a Flash website, Click on Unreal icon on left and
it opens http://unreal.com/index2.html%20 and gives 404 error.

Comment 6

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

This is not a Mozilla problem because whitespaces are already encoded before
Flash Player calls NPN_GetURL().
IE has no problem because Flash ActiveX control does not encode the leading and
trailing whitespaces.
Flash netscape plug-in, however, encodes the leading and trailing whitespaces
rather than trims them.
Macromedia should fix this incompatibility.
-> Tech Evangelism

Comment 7

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Changing URL to working testcase and CC'ing Michelle.

Comment 8

[Michelle Sintov]

[e-mail], could you please send me all the files necessary to see
how the working testcase works, including the Flash fla file and
SingleButton_01.txt file? Thank you.

Comment 9

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Attachment: zipped testcase

I don't have the fla file because I'm not an author of SingleButton_01b.swf.
It's a free Flash material distributed on

Michelle:
I already tried to send zip file directly. Recjeced by mail server ?

Comment 10

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Oops.
distributed on
http://kei.serio.jp/flash/sozai/general2/SingleButton.html
(Japanese site).

sorry for the bugspam.

Comment 11

[Michelle Sintov]

I've confirmed this is a Flash Player bug and logged it in our bugbase. We will
consider making the fix. Thank you for reporting this and giving me such great
detail about the bug.

Comment 12

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

This bug still occurs using Flash Player 8.5 b133.
Any progress?

Comment 13

[Michelle Sintov]

This bug is fixed in Flash Player 9 beta 3:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Comment 14

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Sure. Thanks for your great work!