Author Topic: Retain colons and forward slashes in tags used for custom weblinks?  (Read 5104 times)

hiccup

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When a tag is used to provide content for a custom weblink and that tag contains characters such as ':' or '/', these characters are transformed into %3A and %2F, breaking it's functionality.

E.g. a tag containing:
https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/black-midi
will get transformed to
https%3A%2F%2Frateyourmusic.com%2Fartist%2Fblack-midi
rendering the link unusable.

Could these special characters be left as-is for this functionality?

Capt_Blakhelm

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When does this happen? I have tracks with URLs in album and/or comments and I've never had this problem.

hiccup

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When does this happen? I have tracks with URLs in album and/or comments and I've never had this problem.
So you have album tags that contain url's, and comments that contain slashes/semi-colons, and you use them to feed custom weblinks, and they work perfectly fine?
Could you post some examples or screenshots of those?

Capt_Blakhelm

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I guess I misunderstood the post using weblinks in MB itself instead of sending that data elsewhere outside of MB

Edit: I've never used the Custom Web Links/Open  in Web Browser feature seriously until now, so now I have a better understanding of what you're asking.

For example, I made a custom web link called OCremix to search the OCRemix site by artist name. Since OCremix.org uses a specific number for each artist, I have to use the search page instead of it directly linking to an artist page like some other sites handle.

That said, in my opinion, if the artists tag contains a URL instead of the actual artist name, then the tag itself should be corrected to the artists name. I've spent hours editing tags in my library because of incorrect/missing artist and such. Search and Replace is very helpful when needing to correct large amounts of mistagged tracks.

Most singles on OCRemix have http://ocremix.org as the album title. I would never need to search the web for that via MusicBee, however, for shits ands giggles, I made a Custom WebLink for OCremix to just pull up the Album tag and when used on an OCremix Tag, it produced an error. I didn't read the error, but it may have produced those anomalies you had.

Edit 2:  Did some further tinkering. Was able to make links for search Discogs by Artist OR Album with no problem. Had a Problem when I searched on VGMDB and noticed it converts spaces into  "%20" in the url. This is necessary for most web search engines and works just fine for Discogs. I realized I had the Search URL incorrect for VGMDB

I was using
https://vgmdb.net/search?q=&type=

instead of

https://vgmdb.net/search?q= <Artist> &type= OR https://vgmdb.net/search?q= <Album> &type=

This fixed it and made VGMDB search it properly.

I haven't tried it with a tag that has slashes or colons, but regardless, MusicBee NEEDS to do that in order to prompt the website to use the proper character in a search. And as I opined above, an Artist tag shouldn't be a URL (unless an artist's name is literally an URL).

I think your problem is a tag problem, not a MusicBee Problem
Last Edit: July 05, 2021, 10:14:09 PM by Capt_Blakhelm

Capt_Blakhelm

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Sorry for the double post, but I made an edit to my last post that was so long that it should probably warrant a new post honestly. (and I think it answers your question).