URL with parentheses not correctly parsed

Question

The parenthesis that ends the url of this comment seems not to be considered as part of the link.

The same bug bug was reported on Meta StackOverflow and apparently corrected.

Answer 1

This is intentional as far as automatically linked URLs go. See this answer of mine for the reason.

If, on the other hand, you explicitly say "the link starts here and ends here" by using the link syntax

[see wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology))

it will work, since we allow one level of opened/closed parenthesis, specifically for cases like Wikipedia links.

Update

See URL detecting error with address like "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)" on Meta Stack Overflow for details; long story short: After the next build of the site, this will work as you had expected.

Answer 2

This is easily addressed. A link like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)

and be rewritten with its nonalphanumerics translated into hex using the %XX notation. The ASCII hex set is:

00 nul   01 soh   02 stx   03 etx   04 eot   05 enq   06 ack   07 bel
08 bs    09 ht    0a nl    0b vt    0c np    0d cr    0e so    0f si
10 dle   11 dc1   12 dc2   13 dc3   14 dc4   15 nak   16 syn   17 etb
18 can   19 em    1a sub   1b esc   1c fs    1d gs    1e rs    1f us
20 sp    21  !    22  "    23  #    24  $    25  %    26  &    27  '
28  (    29  )    2a  *    2b  +    2c  ,    2d  -    2e  .    2f  /
30  0    31  1    32  2    33  3    34  4    35  5    36  6    37  7
38  8    39  9    3a  :    3b  ;    3c  <    3d  =    3e  >    3f  ?
40  @    41  A    42  B    43  C    44  D    45  E    46  F    47  G
48  H    49  I    4a  J    4b  K    4c  L    4d  M    4e  N    4f  O
50  P    51  Q    52  R    53  S    54  T    55  U    56  V    57  W
58  X    59  Y    5a  Z    5b  [    5c  \    5d  ]    5e  ^    5f  _
60  `    61  a    62  b    63  c    64  d    65  e    66  f    67  g
68  h    69  i    6a  j    6b  k    6c  l    6d  m    6e  n    6f  o
70  p    71  q    72  r    73  s    74  t    75  u    76  v    77  w
78  x    79  y    7a  z    7b  {    7c  |    7d  }    7e  ~    7f del

And so subbing in the hex for the parens the version of that URL that works is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_%28biology%29

This is easily shown to work by comparing this which works with this which fails.

This is easily shown to work 
by comparing [this which works](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_%28biology%29) 
with [this which fails](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)).

Hm, actually, those both work! In fact, I can’t manage to get a failure mode to crop up. Do you have an example of something that doesn’t work right?

Perhaps balanced parens work but imbalanced ones do not? Unsure; I have no failure test case. But I’ll bet you anything that subbing in the hex for offending characters will cure whatever problem ails you.

Maybe it’s only in comments where the putative pesky paren problem arises? This comment uses the URL above, properly escaped, without a hitch.

So I think this is easily worked around.