Some of the auto-converters from text to HTML for FAQs don't parse the
<URL:...> convention, which I had thought was a standard and which I also
thought was required by yet other converters. In particular, the Ohio State
archive was translating
<URL:http://blah/foo>
into a link that included the trailing >, ie
<a href="http://blah/foo>">...</a>
I worked around this for my own site (which is the only one I usually
reference in this way) by having a student create a PERL CGI script that gets
invoked on a "404 not found" error message; if there is a trailing > it
generates a link without the >, and otherwise just gives the standard "not
found" error. In HTTPD 1.4, which we're running, you set ErrorDocument to
/cgi-bin/theScript; there ought to be equivalents in other servers.
Before I did this, the operations staff created symbolic links for the most
commonly occurring references, e.g. "college.html>" as a symbolic link to
"college.html". My hack is slightly more general, but still not a complete
fix, since it helps only my own site. The best solution is smarter
converters, of course, but that's not within my control.
Here it is:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
$error = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
$redirect_request = $ENV{'REDIRECT_REQUEST'};
($redirect_method,$request_url,$redirect_protocol) = split(' ',$redirect_request);
$redirect_status = $ENV{'REDIRECT_STATUS'};
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<TITLE>".$redirect_status."</TITLE>";
print "<H1>".$redirect_status."</H1>";
print "The requested URL ".$request_url." was not found on this server.<p>";
print "<p>";
if (($possible_url, $offending_character) = ($request_url =~ /(.*)([&>])$/))
{
print "However, I noticed that the URL you requested ended in ";
print "the character ".$offending_character.", which can sometimes ";
print "happen if the link you followed was generated by certain scripts ";
print "that attempt to find URLs in ASCII text. Therefore, ";
print "you might want to try <a href=\"".$possible_url."\">";
print $possible_url."</a> instead.<p>";
}
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