RoboHelp 2020.8.34 output changes URLs of SharePoint links

[mjgm]

Hi! I have three RoboHelp 2020.8.34 projects. Each project contains hundreds of links to different libraries in SharePoint. The problem: the %3a symbol (:) is transformed into a %25a symbol when HTML and .aspx Output is created. For example, 

For some reason, RoboHelp is changing the %3a symbol reference in the URL to a %25a, which of course breaks the links. Can anyone shed some light on this?

[Amebr]

I think the original url contains colons which have been escaped to %3a (the code for a colon for URLs), then during the sharepoint conversion the % is being escaped to %25.

I'm not sure where the escaping is happening (it doesn't seem to happen for RH2019, and I can't test right now on RH2020 nor with an actual sharepoint server) but you could try replacing the %3a with colons (:) in one topic and see what happens to the URL after you generate the sharepoint output.

[mjgm]

Thanks for your kind response to this problem. I found out the following:

1. Because I had 170 links to enter into RoboHelp, I downloaded them to an Excel worksheet from SharePoint and then I extracted the hyperlinks. I copied the hyperlinks from the Excel worksheet into RH.

2. The hyperlinks I copied and pasted all have the : in them, not %3a or %25a. 

3. When I produce the output (HTML output), RoboHelp changes all colon signs into %25a. Our SharePoint does NOT like that and reports a broken link. 

4. I manually changed some of the %25a in the output into %3a and the links work. 

5. When I produce the output, it changed the %3a to %25a again.

6. I then copied the links directly from SharePoint (this happened after I reported the problem), created new output, and everything worked. RH changed the : to %3a, which is accepted by SharePoint. 

So only the links taken from the Excel worksheet have that problem. Why? Because MS? I don't know but I'm glad I found a solution, albeit mildly painful because now I have to make 170 round trips to SharePoint to get the links one by one.