broken URL in tracking links

[dflasse]

From time to time, we must send the same campaign over and over again with only small updates (agenda, venue details, etc). It might not be good practice but it is the way our members expect to be informed.

We recently noticed that some links included in our campaign are broken: a "%20" appears in the link sent to recipients. For example: we have a link to www.hostname.og/abc/def that is changed to http://www.hostname.org/sites/a%20l%20l/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=36959&qid=638275 (I underlined the %20 - blank characters). If I manually edit the URL and remove the %20, the link is correct.

What is really odd is that the %20 seems to appear over time. We did not have the problem on the first versions of the mailing. It also look like, the %20 is moving. It is not always located at the same place in the URL (it used to be between 'sit' and 'es'). Most of the links on the mailing are ok. Only some of them are broken.

[adixon]

That %20 is an url-encoded space. So something is adding spaces, which get converted to those "%20".

Without any other information, I'd say that's a sign of a pretty broken system - I'd blame your host as a first line of inquiry, since I can't imagine your code doing this. If there was only one of them, I might think it's related to your url length and something that decided it needed to be split and then something else that's putting it back together. Something is mangling the url after it leaves CiviCRM, in any case, maybe some php or apache module.

Ah, but this is going out as mail, so perhaps it's some anti-spam something gone amuck.

[dflasse]

I doubt it. Only some links are broken. Not all. And only on this very often used campaign. It is clearly civimail that breaks it since the table in the database has the right tracking data.

[petednz]

i have seen similar before where content from one mailing has been copied in to another and the %20 ends up in the source so I would be looking at the html but sounds like you have ruled that out

[dflasse]

Yes. The source is correct. And so is the url field is the table civicrm_mailing_trackable_url.