493267 - Enhancement to remove "<" and ">" from URL entries

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Jeffery Small]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042715 Firefox/3.0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042715 Firefox/3.0.10

I often cut/paste URL addresses into Firefox.  Often these URLs are recorded in other documents between a pare of "<" and ">" brackets.  It is difficult to always grab the exact URL without also occasionally getting one or both of these brackets included.  When you then enter that URL, you get redirected to Google (in my case) to attempt to "research" the bad address.

Firefox already rewrites the URLs to add "http://", look for a hit with/without "www.", etc.  It would be great if it could also make a quick check for a leading "<" or a trailing ">" and automatically remove them.  This should cause no other problems since these are not valid URL characters.

Amazingly, there are some well known websites such as Google, Yahoo and Mozilla that you can enter with a leading "<" and this rogue character will be automatically stripped.  However, this does not work for all websites.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Try the address:

<http://go-galt.org

and you are redirected to Google.

or try:

http://www.go-galt.org>

and you get an "Address Not Found" error page from Firefox.

Or try:

<http://www.savewright.org>

and you will again be directed to Google.


Expected Results:  
Simply strip the bad characters and arrive at the correct website.

Comment 1

[Jeffery Small]

On a related note, when pasting URLs from a source that spans multiple lines, occasionally one or more spaces get inserted into the address.  It would be great if Firefox also scanned for these and automatically removed them.

Comment 2

[Jeffery Small]

Following up to my previous comment, the problem with internal spaces in the URLs has recently become a greater problem.  I used to cut addresses that spanned multiple lines and they got pasted into the Firefox address bar without problem.  However, recently, it seems as if all line breaks or <CR>s are getting pasted as a space, which leads to invalid URLs.  Was a change made in the last couple of updates to Fire4fox that made this problem much worse?  In any case, it would be great to have Firefox pre-process the address line and make as many sensible corrections as possible to increase the chances of getting a correctly formatted line.

Comment 3

[Carlos Alén Silva]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=394732

This extension tackles this issue (and more)

Comment 4

[Jeffery Small]

Hey, thanks for the reference.  I really appreciate the feedback.  While this does address a subset of the problems I experience, it is not a complete solution.  Often I am cutting a URL from a location other than the browser.  For example, I might cut the URL string from an email and then paste it into the browser's address bar.  This is where the rogue characters come from and which I would like Firefox to automatically parse and eliminate.  Unfortunately, this "Plain Text Links" add-on will not address this problem.