604775 - Certain characters in urls can be hidden from users (eg. soft hyphens)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1494382

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[ufo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101001 Firefox/3.6.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101001 Firefox/3.6.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When a soft hyphen (as a 0xAD byte, not as &shy) and potentially other characters is present in the address bar, it is not rendered, yet affects the url. I don't know whether soft hyphens are allowed in URI's, but when they are in the address bar, you can't tell and this helps to mislead users.

A user might end up surfing to a different url than is shown to them in the address bar.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments=1&v=tE74mH4yP24
2. In the comment that says "Hey fair enough" there is a link, copy it and paste it in the address bar. The link that is visible will be different from the link that is used when pressed enter.
3. Paste the link in IE location bar or in a text editor to see the hyphen.
Actual Results:  
Soft hyphens and potentially other characters are not rendered, yet used

Expected Results:  
Either strip out invalid characters, or show them to the user, don't hide them.

Comment 1

[j.j.]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101016 Firefox/4.0b8pre


Copy and paste within Firefox: doesn't work (redirects to http://www.youtube.com/)

If if I copy with Firefox and copy into Opera location bar, it does not work (same as above)

If I copy the link with my Opera browser and paste it into Firefox location bar, it works.

(The soft hyphen is between "a" and "4" in the example given in comment 0)