DEV REQUEST: unwrap hrefs and img src links

Report · Aug 23, 2006

Please forgive me if I'm posting to the wrong area.

I've got an issue where dreamweaver wraps hrefs and img tags right in the middle of the link sometimes and my email dist tool chokes on it. the links and img are broken. I have three of four different developers sending me 10-15 emails per week to send and having to go through all the code for each one each week is time consuming.

Can I request an extension to analyze the link and unwrap/rejoin the link if so? Anything between the quotes should be on one line and, of course, no spaces. Other handy things would be checking for backslashes instead of forward slahses and replacing.

This is becoming more and more of an issue for me so I hope someone will help and/or tell me if I'm posting to the wrong area.

Best,

Rob.

Report · Aug 23, 2006

robhvs wrote:
> Please forgive me if I'm posting to the wrong area.
>
> I've got an issue where dreamweaver wraps hrefs and img tags right in the
> middle of the link sometimes and my email dist tool chokes on it. the links
> and img are broken. I have three of four different developers sending me 10-15
> emails per week to send and having to go through all the code for each one each
> week is time consuming.

What do you mean specifically that DW wraps your links? Can you show step by step example of what you're doing and what DW does?

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 24, 2006

Sure. DW forces line breaks / wraps like this:

<a
href=" http://www.adobe.com/index.html">Home</a>

or
<a href=
" http://www.adobe.com/index.html">Home</a>

or <img
src=
" http://www.adobe.com/images/1.gif">

or back slashes <img src=" http://www.adobe.com\images\1\1.gif">

My mail dist program converts the backslashes to line feeds and breaks the images. and if the hrefs aren't all on one line, the clicks aren't tracked. However simple this might sound, I would really appreciate someone helping.

Report · Aug 24, 2006

robhvs wrote:
> Sure. DW forces line breaks / wraps like this:
>
> <a
> href=" http://www.adobe.com/index.html">Home</a>
>
> or
> <a href=
> " http://www.adobe.com/index.html">Home</a>
>
> or <img
> src=
> " http://www.adobe.com/images/1.gif">
>
> or back slashes <img src=" http://www.adobe.com\images\1\1.gif">

I've never seen DW change code like this.

When and where is DW doing this? Is it doing that when you add a link within Design view, or does it do that when you take some other action? What steps are you taking to have DW end up with the code the way you are pasting it?

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

Many of the emails I sent are copies of copies of copies, for example, a newsletter. We only change certain parts each time. While I know code, I don't have to go into code view much anymore. It's just pasting in teaser paragraphs. Over time, spacing and lines change and somehow they wrap. I do high volume and many of them eventually get ugly. I apply source formatting every once in a while but that don't put tags bac k together. I can appreciate you wanted to duplicate the issue but I couldn't tell you what to do to replicate it. Offline, I can provide link after link after link to past newsletters with issues. Can you/someone tell me if what i'm asking for is even possible? I wouldn't know the first thing about creating an extension or anything else that could help me here. I also use ultraedit but the unwrap feature is basic and would require a few extra steps. I'm hoping for an easier solution that double-checking all the unwrapping after it's done.

Rob

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:
> Many of the emails I sent are copies of copies of copies, for example, a
> newsletter. We only change certain parts each time. While I know code, I
> don't have to go into code view much anymore. It's just pasting in teaser
> paragraphs. Over time, spacing and lines change and somehow they wrap. I do
> high volume and many of them eventually get ugly. I apply source formatting
> every once in a while but that don't put tags bac k together. I can appreciate
> you wanted to duplicate the issue but I couldn't tell you what to do to
> replicate it. Offline, I can provide link after link after link to past
> newsletters with issues. Can you/someone tell me if what i'm asking for is
> even possible? I wouldn't know the first thing about creating an extension or
> anything else that could help me here. I also use ultraedit but the unwrap
> feature is basic and would require a few extra steps. I'm hoping for an easier
> solution that double-checking all the unwrapping after it's done.

Sounds to me that the wrapping is being introduced by the use of email to pass the text you want on your page. If you were able to get them to send you attachments with HTML files or some other format that you'd end up with better results.

Are you sending plain text emails or HTML emails? If HTML, then the breaking shouldn't matter. The "wrong" way slashes would I guess, but that sound more like your developers doing things incorrectly, such as taking a base URL path such as http://www.adobe.com/ and adding in a file path that they browsed to using Windows Explorer to get the rest of the URL.

However, given it's likely that's it tough to change your processes, the question at hand is can DW somehow auto convert back the links. I'd say that it could be possible, but variety of ways that it's breaking that it would be tough to handle programmatically.

Personally, I'd spend my effort on trying to get your developers to send you the code in a more appropriate transfer media than email.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

Hi Rob,

I don't have a solution, but I seem to recall having a similar problem a few years ago. I think Danilo might be spot on with his assessment.

If I remember, the problem related to an "invisible" character that seemed to be produced by Outlook. Under normal conditions the character is as I said "invisible", but manifested itself when people 1) constructed a document with Word, then 2) copied and pasted it in a outlook e-mail, which was then 3) copied and pasted into a database field (I think) for inclusion in a dynamic ASP page.

When I later, copied and pasted step 3 back into a Word document with "reveal formatting characters" turned on, an unusual character appeared. It looked something like a malformed symbol for the degree (°) symbol. There were multiple instences of this little character that I had to manually (or use search and replace) strip away for the page to work.

Could that be your problem?

TPK

Report · Aug 25, 2006

I'm looking for a lazy solution. I have many developers that are more designers than coders and, as a matter of fact, a few non-techy, marketing people pasting text from word, emails, etc into DW and send to me for deployment. They aren't going to fix code and I don't have time. The exact problem is that my email tool will not encode a ilnk that is on multiple lines into its own trackable link. i.e.

this: <A
href=" http://www.adobe.com/">click</a> isn't encoded into anything but still works as a link.
and this
this: <A href=" http://www.adobe.com/">click</a> is endcoded into something like <A href=" http://www.emailsender.com/?8923487923">click</a> and I see a report of who clicked on the link.

It's a limitation of my sender but a problem nonetheless. And with the volume, I am unwilling to fix all of the links.

The backslash problem is an infrequent problem and one that I don't crucially need but is a bonus if I get it. That fixes img calls done incorrectly.

How DW or my designers get this code like this doesn't concern me. Mabye it is a result of pasting and this or that. It's more an issue of can I find a tool that will help me fix a problem to make me faster and allow me to build a better email - an email with more links that are trackable.

I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links. It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and maybe in other places.

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:

> I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i
> save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links.
> It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and
> maybe in other places.

If the issue is derived from pasting from emails that have, as TPK suggests, "bad" characters in them, one way to check in DW8 is to view hidden characters: View > Code View Options > Hidden Characters

You may be able to select one of the characters and then do a replace all. From there you may be able to save these queries (if there is more than one character or character combinations) and run them one at a time against the page.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:

> I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i
> save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links.
> It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and
> maybe in other places.

If the issue is derived from pasting from emails that have, as TPK suggests, "bad" characters in them, one way to check in DW8 is to view hidden characters: View > Code View Options > Hidden Characters

You may be able to select one of the characters and then do a replace all. From there you may be able to save these queries (if there is more than one character or character combinations) and run them one at a time against the page.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:

> I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i
> save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links.
> It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and
> maybe in other places.

If the issue is derived from pasting from emails that have, as TPK suggests, "bad" characters in them, one way to check in DW8 is to view hidden characters: View > Code View Options > Hidden Characters

You may be able to select one of the characters and then do a replace all. From there you may be able to save these queries (if there is more than one character or character combinations) and run them one at a time against the page.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:

> I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i
> save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links.
> It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and
> maybe in other places.

If the issue is derived from pasting from emails that have, as TPK suggests, "bad" characters in them, one way to check in DW8 is to view hidden characters: View > Code View Options > Hidden Characters

You may be able to select one of the characters and then do a replace all. From there you may be able to save these queries (if there is more than one character or character combinations) and run them one at a time against the page.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert

Report · Aug 25, 2006

robhvs wrote:

> I envision using this tool by opening DW, doing my thing to it and before i
> save and upload to email tool, I run a script/whatever that checks these links.
> It looks for and removes hard returns between a and href most importantly and
> maybe in other places.

If the issue is derived from pasting from emails that have, as TPK suggests, "bad" characters in them, one way to check in DW8 is to view hidden characters: View > Code View Options > Hidden Characters

You may be able to select one of the characters and then do a replace all. From there you may be able to save these queries (if there is more than one character or character combinations) and run them one at a time against the page.

--
Danilo Celic
| Extending Knowledge Daily : http://CommunityMX.com/
| Adobe Community Expert