:x: in office 365 excel links are getting interpreted as emoji, thus breaking the link

[bhiltbrand]

Does anyone have a workaround for this issue? When I try to post links in flowdock like this:

 

https://fbmicoi.sharepoint.com/:x:/r/sites/SystemsTeam/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc=%7B84ae71f0-64b8-4395-98d5-90232b6… 

The ":x:" in the link gets translated to the red X emoji in the attached picture. This then breaks the link, making it unusable. I have tried formatting it as a link, as code, and putting it in quotes. None of those options work, and the flowdock app still screws up the link.

 

I could fix it by deleting or renaming the emoji to something other than ":x:", but that breaks the Jenkins integration we rely on to let us know about build failures. Does anyone have any other thoughts.

[Dave LeDeaux]

Hi Brett,

 

I'm going to check with dev on this as the behavior does seem a little heavy handed.  I tried formatting it a few different ways as well using markdown but the only way I could keep Flowdock from substituting the sequence was to put ` ticks around it like `https://fbmicoi.sharepoint.com/:x:/r/sites/SystemsTeam/_layout`.  Of course it's not a clickable link after that.

 

One thing I'm curious about is if it would be possible to URL encode the colons so that you were using something more like https://fbmicoi.sharepoint.com/%3Ax%3A/r/sites/SystemsTeam/_layout 

 

This keeps Flowdock from seeing it as a colon to interpret and might still be parsed correctly on your web server side.

[Dave LeDeaux]

Hi Brett,

 

I went ahead and filed a defect for this just to get it in front of dev.  It's too early to tell anything on it yet.

 

I'm curious about the workaround with the URL encoded characters though; did that help?

[bhiltbrand]

Dude! You rock!!! This works perfectly. I don't know why I never thought about using the URL encode. It would be nice to have it work out of the box, but this workaround will be just fine until then. Thank you so much!!!