I don't know where this is going but... urlscan doesn't handle URLs
that contain UTF-8 characters.  I just received an email which
contains the following URL which urlscan fails to parse correctly:
http://www.pantherhouse.com/newshelton/my-wife-thinks-i’m-a-swan/
When I paste it into Firefox directly, it successfully opens
http://www.pantherhouse.com/newshelton/my-wife-thinks-i%E2%80%99m-a-swan/

I'm not quite sure how to handle this since it essentially means that
virtually any character can appear in an URL.  Maybe you have a good
idea.

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 05:17:14PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> was heard to say:

  Ick.  Is that even a legal URL?

  One idea would be to use an exclusive, rather than inclusive, regexp
to find URLs.  Consider a URL to be anything starting with "http" and
terminated by whitespace or a few special characters (say, ["',.?>]).
This seems more failure-prone, though, as I can't possibly predict every
convention people use to terminate URLs (e.g., what about » or ¿; I'm
sure there are more I don't know).

  Another option would be to add a command to "lengthen" a match, telling
urlscan to update the currently selected match with the immediately
following character (or maybe the next character & everything else that
looks like part of a URL).  This might be the best solution, since weird
URLs like that seem like an oddity, and urlscan will probably make
inevitable errors in other situations anyway.

  Daniel

* Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> [2007-01-26 21:04]:

I have no idea, but it works when I paste it into Firefox.

Yes, I agree that it'll be hard to get it right all the time.  I'd
personally assume that ' was part of the URL but for example » isn't;
but I might be wrong, and any rule you put into urlscan will get it
wrong in some cases. :/

Something like this would probably be best.

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
urlscan, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 408126@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Marcin Kulisz <debian@kulisz.net> (supplier of updated urlscan package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:45:53 +0100
Source: urlscan
Architecture: source
Version: 1.1.2-1
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Marcin Kulisz <debian@kulisz.net>
Changed-By: Marcin Kulisz <debian@kulisz.net>
Closes: 408126 893399 1066992
Changes:
 urlscan (1.1.2-1) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * New upstream version 1.1.2 (Closes: 1066992, 893399, 408126)
   * Removing hatch-vcs from build-deb upstream is not using it anymore
   * Removing d/control files already provied by dpkg =< 1.22.13
   * d/watch bumpup to version 5
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