I recently created a record / news story that included a quotation in the headline (or record title in IPS Field terms). Something like the below:

Person From Company Issuing “Notice” to All Users

It turns out that, upon publish, the “ quote marks in the title are being printed in the URL slug. So the resulting URL would turn out like this:

[site]/[database]/person-from-company-issuing-“notice”-to-all-users-rXX

I think the same thing happens with single quote marks like ‘ as well. I don’t think this should be happening…

I don’t have any screenshots to share on this I’m afraid, but also when I tried to fix the situation by editing the record in the front end and creating a custom URL slug (basically just the same thing but without the quote marks), the IPS Suite errored out on me. I can try to replicate this for you if you need me to, but hopefully this report is enough?

Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this on the latest release with the URL slug not removing any quotes, single or double. I would recommend starting out by disabling all third party applications/plugins and trying again to see if you can reproduce this. If you can, please let us know the URL and we can investigate this for you.

It depends on the type of quotation mark. 

Those "

are removed. Proper typographic quotation marks 

like those “ ”

are not removed. They are just treated like any other character. 

I believe what opentype is saying is correct there. Are you saying there is some issue occurring when they are included? Or simply that you believe It may be incorrect?

Sorry to bring this topic up again - this issue has occurred again today, and I remembered this topic to check in and remind myself what the responses were. I checked and the headline did in fact have a typographic quotation mark and that was what was displayed in the URL. I changed the quote marks to a standard " and it fixed the URL.

My question is, why does IPS Suite include typographic/curvy quote marks in URLs? I cannot see a use case where this would be a desired result (I can see why people would want typographic quotes to be displayed on a page/in a headline, but never in a URL). Is it possible to close this rather odd 'loophole' and have IPS/Pages handle typographic quote marks the same way it does regular quote marks?

Because they are valid characters, so would not actually be changed. Is it causing a problem with the URL itself?

Yes, it’s causing problems - when using typographical (curvy) quote marks in a Pages title, the quote marks are added to a record’s URL, for example:

domain.com/database/vinyl-4”-record

Because these typographical quote marks are not standard characters for URLs, it causes huge issues when sharing these links (on social media for example - Tumblr simply refuses to acknowledge the above as a valid link) and sometimes even when clicking through to them as either browsers or the IPS software has trouble parsing the correct destination due to the quote mark inclusion.

This doesn’t seem to be an issue when using regular “non-curvy” quote marks as these characters are ignored when IPS creates the URL slug. It would be great if IPS also ignored the typographical quotes too to avoid future issues and confusion.

I have moved this to the feedback area for you

EDIT: I have found a solution to an issue I have been facing on iOS where quote marks were always appearing as typographical (curvy) and therefore would always present broken links in IPS URLs (example below):

For anyone else with this issue, go Settings > General > Keyboards > Turn off Smart Punctuation. Figured I'd share for people who were tearing their hair out at this like I have been 🙂

Edited August 10, 20231 yr by Dreadknux

Thank you for coming back to share 🙂

No problem Marc - I still believe there should be some additional feature for IPS to remove even typographical quote marks from URLs, as they serve no functional purpose (and actually serve to break URLs as displayed above), but at least I have a way to avoid making that happen on mobile now. 🙂 

Edited August 10, 20231 yr by Dreadknux