273886 - bookmarks don't decode entities in href

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Ricardo SIGNES]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Bookmarks that contain entities (at least &) are not properly decoded.  The
HREF attribute on an anchor should be html-encoded, and ampersands replaced with
& -- if a bookmarks file that does this is loaded as a normal HTML document,
the links are followed properly.  (see URL) If it is imported to the bookmarks
file, the links are not decoded before being followed.  This breaks the links.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. create a bookmarks (HTML) file with & in the href attribute
2. import it
3. weep as I can't follow the imported link properly

Actual Results:  
& showed up in the url bar

Expected Results:  
a plain & should show up

Comment 1

[Paul van Schayck]

Earlier reporter in bug 220581. That one was resolved as WFM. Bug 220581 comment
4 also mentions bug 223762.

Comment 2

[Ricardo SIGNES]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Earlier reporter in bug 220581. That one was resolved as WFM. Bug 220581 comment
> 4 also mentions bug 223762.

Bug 223762 is not on point.  It refers to encoding bookmark text before storing.
 (That is, if the user types "Foo & Bar" as the bookmark title, it is stored
properly HTML-encoded as the text of the A element in the bookmarks file.)

Bug 220581 is, however, quite the same issue.  (I tried searching, I really
did!) Unfortunately, I can't agree with its WFM status.  It sure doesn't WFM.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Bug 220581 might be useful as a reminder to someone of when things might have
changed, but beyond that it's not much help. Among other things, Jeff was just
"importing" (and it's not clear whether that means through Bookmark Manager -
File - Import - From file or just copying over an old bookmarks.html) a Firefox
bookmarks file from a previous install, so it could have been that at the time
it was writing with entities, parsing them while reading, but not parsing them
while importing and then double-escaping while writing, so that the WFM could
have come from not writing them anymore, rather than anything useful to this
problem.

In any case, there's no doubt that in 1.0 and 20041209 trunk (and current
Seamonkey, too) when you import from an arbitrary HTML file with properly
entity-escaped ampersands in the URLs, you wind up with a bookmark that doesn't
work right. It could be wontfixed, if there's some good reason why we have to
work that way, but it certainly doesn't workforme.

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 6

[buovjaga]

I tried with https://bug220581.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=137635
It works for me. I am hesitant to close as the experience has been different for different folks in the past.
Win 10, FF 51.0.1 (64-bit)

Comment 7

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to buovjaga from comment #6)
> I tried with https://bug220581.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=137635
> It works for me. I am hesitant to close as the experience has been different
> for different folks in the past.
> Win 10, FF 51.0.1 (64-bit)

The test case also WFM on latest Mac nightly build.