Confluence: How do I create a link that contains special characters?

Question

How can I add a link to

http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4j/com/ibm/icu/text/MessageFormat.html#format(java.lang.Object[], java.lang.StringBuffer, java.text.FieldPosition)

to a confluence page? The [] syntax doesn't work, probably because of the special characters.

My first attempt was to paste the URL into Firefox but for some reason, the browser accepts it as it is (instead of replacing all the special characters) :-( Same for Chrome.

What other tools can I use on Linux to turn this into something that Confluence will handle correctly?

Answer 1

Commas, parenthesis, and spaces are either illegal or reserved in URLs and must be percent encoded. So try:

http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4j/com/ibm/icu/text/MessageFormat.html#format%28java.lang.Object%5B%5D%2C%20java.lang.StringBuffer%2C%20java.text.FieldPosition%29

Most programming languages have functions that percent encode URLs. (I used Python's urllib2.quote for this.) There are also several websites that will do it for you.