272133 - please properly escaped URLs copied from browser (e.g. ampersands)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 264846

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jon Dowland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.8

When copying a URL from the browser, the resultant text in the clipboard should
be  properly escaped, so that subsequent pasting of the URL into a page's source
code or an XML document doesn't result in malformed XML.

There are a number of different ways of copying URLs from the browser into the
clipboard and you may have a varying opinion of how relevant this is depending
on each one.

For example, you can copy a URL by right-clicking it in the location bar and
selecting copy (or hitting an OS key combination). You may not agree that the
resultant info in the clipboard should be different from that displayed in the
address bar. I'd argue that the result, although different, is still a valid URL.

You can also copy a URL by right-clicking a hyperlink and selecting 'Copy Link
Location'. I think that the resulting text should definitely be escaped
properly. E.g. copying the following URL

http://foo.com/bar?a=b&c=d

..should result in the clipboard containing

http://foo.com/bar?a=b&c=d

irrespective of what the page's source URL was.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. find a page containing a hyper link or fill the address bar
2. right-click on the hyper link / the address bar
3. select 'copy link location'  / 'copy'

Actual Results:  
Clipboard contains a direct copy of the URL, without special characters being
escaped.

Expected Results:  
The clipboard should contain a URL escaped so that the result can be
incorporated into an XML/XHTML page without resulting in malformed XML.

Comment 1

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 264846 ***