553140 - Thunderbird and Seamonkey misread RSS feed url with the symbol "|" (or) in it

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 549741

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[aula.mens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3 ThunderBrowse/3.2.8.1

Some well-known site, like Workopolis.com, prvide results of search in RSS feed format. The RSS link they generate contains logical exressions OR as "|" symbol. Both Thunderbird and Seamonkey first accept this feed subscription and load articles properly, but only for the first time.
When you get / re-load articles from the server again, the feed link breaks into several pieces (dvidied by where the symbol "|" was ) and several feeds are created. Of course they don't work properly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create RSS feed in Thunderbird: http://www.workopolis.com/Feed/P/EN/jobs?l=mississauga|toronto|east+york|etobicoke|gta|greater+toronto|greater+toronto+area|north+york|richmond+hill|scarborough|york|brampton|caledon&j=system+analyst&lg=en&jt=fulltime|contract
2. Load RSS articles
3. Wait a little bit and manually reload them again by hitting "get messages" - you will get now irrelevant articles because the link was cut by the first symbol "|"
4. Check urls in subscription manager to see that you got now several feeds instead of one. Those urls re either giving wrong results (for the first feed) or non-working (for other feeds-remains)
Actual Results:  
You are getting irrelevant results because the link address was shrotened

Expected Results:  
To show relevant search results, Not to split one subscription feed into several ones.


Reproduced the same problem on two separate computers with Win7 and ThunderBird 3.0.3
Link Addresses with "|" work fine in other RSS readers. 
RSS just doesnt work in thunderbird

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

dupe of bug 549741 ?

Comment 2

[aula.mens]

Yes, it is the same issue. 
But we should NOT be saying it's the wrong Internet url that shouldn't work on our right program!
Big high traffic websites actively use that symbol in their url. 
People not being able to access what they need with this mozilla product would  switch to another competitive product that can do that.
Nobody would bother if it is a Workopolis's or Thunderbird's fault. They just know that other readers can work correctly with such symbol in url. So they just switch. Most of them don't even realize what is happening - they just get wrong irrelevant pages and conclude the program is working properly.

I reported this bug here because I wanted to stay with thunderbird. But if developers insist that it is an invalid url and therefore this bug wouldn't be fixed, I would switch too.