CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In the HTML version of a civimail message, I'm including some tokens inside an <a href=""> URL, like this:

<a href="https://ourwebsite.org/contributionpage?{contact.checksum}&amp;cid={contact.contact_id}">Click here to renew, join, or make a special contribution</a></p>
The problem is when the tokens are inserted and the email sent, it comes out with a double quotation mark.  This breaks the HTML (in some browsers/email clients) and results in a garbled message.  It looks like this:

<a href="https://ourwebsite.org/contributionpage?cs=32122fb8f9da781c76292268f621257d_1359594986_168&amp;cid=19337"">Click here to renew, join, or make a special contribution</a>
Note the double quotation marks after 19337.

Is anyone else experiencing this?  (Note that some browsers silently ignore the double quotation marks and display the email correctly despite the error.  Others don't and display a garbled page.  To be sure, you'll have to look at the source code of the email message.)

I found the source of the extra quotation marks in CRM/Mailing/BAO/Mailing.php about line 1363:

      // add trailing quote since we've gobbled it up in a previous regex
      // function getPatterns, line 431
      if (preg_match('/^href[ ]*=[ ]*\'/', $url)) {
        $url .= "'";
      }
      elseif (preg_match('/^href[ ]*=[ ]*\"/', $url)) {
        $url .= '"';
      }

Just disabling that 'if' statement solved the problem for me.  But I'm wondering if that is the general solution, others are having this same problem, or what?  That 'if' statement must have been put in because it was needed at some point.

I tried to test using the demo site, but I couldn't get the $&*& thing to send me an email message--neither the test nor the real message worked.  I even tried putting in a working SMTP server and also firing off the cron job for civimail, neither helped.

That same 'problem' code is still in the current version of Mailing.php on fisheye (link). 

Any thoughts--anyone else having this problem? 

FYI I'm on 4.2.3 and Drupal 6.