May 20, 2013

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URLs in a Post for Facebook Fan Page Do Not Work on Facebook APP

Amazon If you include a URL with non-ASCII characters in a post you create for your Facebook fan page you may find that your link does not work on mobile devices through the Facebook app. Why?

Background
Let's suppose your URL contains non-ASCII characters it may look like the following.

http://www.chtoen.com/使出絕招的英文怎麼說
For some reason the latest Facebook app on iPhone at the time of the writing has a bug handling non-ASCII characters. If you include the URL above in a post for your Facebook fan page you'll see a blank screen when you click on the URL in the fan page

This behavior occurs on my iPhone 4. For some reason I cannot find the version of the Facebook app installed on my iPhone but it is the latest version at the time of the writing.
What's funny is this bug does not exist if you access your fan page from the Facebook website.

Solution
The solution is simple. Simply use URL encoded URLs. For example use

http://www.chtoen.com/%E7%A7%98%E5%AF%86%E6%AD%A6%E5%99%A8%E7%9A%84%E8%8B%B1%E6%96%87%E6%80%8E%E9%BA%BC%E8%AA%AA
instead of

http://www.chtoen.com/使出絕招的英文怎麼說
How do you get URL encoded URLs? Type out the URL with non-ascii characters in it in the URL field of the Chrome browser; then select and copy the entire URL from the URL field and you get URL encoded URL when you paste it

Questions? Let me know!
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One Minute Information - by Michael Wen
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