How to make working URL links when they have parentheses and special characters
Last edited Sat Oct 4, 2025, 05:02 PM - Edit history (1)
Here's a typical link that doesn't work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Always_Be_My)_Sunshine
To get links like that to work, you need to substitute the parentheses and other characters that sometimes appear such as hash marks. It's a bit technical, but you look up "ascii parenthesis" and choose the unicode or hex value. Here's a good link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
In particular, substitute %28 for ( and %29 for ).
There ASCII URL encoders and decoders, but they tend to encode colons and sometimes the slashes so they don't work too well.
https://www.url-encode-decode.com/ produces:
https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine
https://ascii.cl/url-encoding.htm produces:
https%3A//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine
You might use them and maybe save a little time or trouble by just replacing the %3A with the colon, which is easy to remember since it is near the front and we've seen thousands of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine
= new reply since forum marked as read
The original example went to a valid page when it was truncated by the DU page, but not the intended page. That caused confusion which I described.
So to make a more illustrative discussion, I changed to a different example where the truncation did not lead to a valid page, in order to make the effectiveness of the character code substitutions crystal clear.
Everything I've done is this thread has been out in the open. There is no dishonesty. 
The original edit is still available in the edit record. The green indicator provided by DU includes a link to the Edit History. But even without the green, you can click on the big number in the Recommendations box upper left to get to the Edit History. There you can click on All to see All of the edits.
