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mjgm
Known Participant
August 18, 2022
Question

RoboHelp 2020.8.34 output changes URLs of SharePoint links

  • August 18, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 253 views

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?

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    1 reply

    A
    Community Expert
    AmebrCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 18, 2022

    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.

     

     

      M
      mjgmAuthor
      Known Participant
      August 19, 2022

      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. 

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