354567 - Non-ascii characters in a mailto link corrupt subsequent text

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 169388

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Chad Redman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.5.0.7 (20060909)

Thunderbird is defined as the default email client on a WIndows XP machine. Clicking on a mailto link in the browser opens up Thunderbird. If there is an 8-bit character in the url greater than %7F, that character and any subsequent characters are corrupted, all showing up as question marks in a black diamond. This happens for either subject and body.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set up Thunderbird as the default mail client
2. Open either Firefox or Internet Explorer
3. Enter the URL into the URL text box: mailto:?subject=test%20o%92%20thunderbird

Actual Results:  
Subject of email message: test o�������������

Expected Results:  
Subject of email message: test o’ thunderbird

The "right single quotation mark" can be typed directly, using ALT + numpad 0146, into Thunderbird, so it is not an issue of being unable to display the character

Comment 1

[Allan Jacobs]

Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1)
Gecko/20060918 Firefox/2.0
Thunderbird: version 1.5.0.7 (20060909)

Use cut and paste to enter a right single quotation mark into the Location
bar text field of Firefox (instead of a %92);  as in
mailto:?subject=test%20o`%20thunderbird .  Then hit carriage return.  The
subject line and title of Thunderbird will be fine.

Enter mailto:?subject=test%20o%92%20thunderbird .  Then hit carriage return.  The subject line and title of Thunderbird will be corrupt.

This bug should have its status changed from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

When a URL has escaped characters like that (which it should, rather than containing non-ASCII characters), it's supposed to encode those characters as UTF-8.

In this particular case, the "right single quotation mark" you're talking about is at codepoint 8217 (hex 2019) in Unicode.   (Codepoint 146 is where the same character is placed in Windows-1252.)  2019 converts to UTF-8 as a three-byte value:  E2 80 99.  So this should do what you're looking for:
  mailto:?subject=test%20o%E2%80%99%20thunderbird

I'm not sure if Allan Jacobs realized that the ` character he typed in is not the character we're talking about -- it's an ASCII "accent grave", and one of my biggest peeves is people using it as a quote mark, since it's not only semantically wrong, it always looks wrong.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 169388 ***