Category TOC (table of contents) no longer works for categories with punctuation in the category name

Question

The category table of contents template seems to have quit working for categories that have punctuation (such as a comma) in the category name. It still generates a clickable alphabetical list in these categories, but the links go to an error page ("The requested page title was invalid, empty, or an incorrectly linked inter-language or inter-wiki title. It may contain one or more characters which cannot be used in titles.").

For example, see Category: Braintree, Massachusetts.

Category TOC still works in categories without commas in the title. For categories with commas in the name, I've tried omitting the category= parameter, entering that parameter in plain text (e.g., category=Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- that format used to work) entering it with a comma and underscore (e.g., category=Lancaster,_Pennsylvania) and entering it in coded format (e.g., category=Braintree%2C_Massachusetts). None of these works.

Answer 1

Not sure what the problem is. It is working fine for me.

Comments

So when you go to the Braintree category and click on a letter of the alphabet, you see something that's not an error page?

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No, sorry, you are right.

Answer 2

Hi Ellen,

That's odd. Do you remember it working before?

In this case, we could remove the TOC. It would be confusing even if it works, I think, since there are only two pages.

Chris

Comments

Yes, this template always worked before (but I'm not sure when I last checked it). I think it's possible that it stopped working whenever the template was edited to eliminate the need for the category= parameter.

These two categories are not the only categories with commas in the category name that use TOCs -- Category: Boston, Massachusetts runs to 3 pages and could soon spill over to a 4th page. I think that the ability to navigate a large category with a TOC (instead of moving forward one page at a time) is vitally important if categories are going to be useful to people. Category TOC works at Wikipedia for categories  with commas -- for example, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Albany,_New_York

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I think it's got http: in it that needs changing to https: - apparently the encoding is different.

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Yes, from looking at the changes documented in https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Template:Category_TOC&action=history it's clear that the template has http embedded in it.

And the template was edited in September to eliminate the need for category=, so it's possible that the problem crept in then, but wasn't detected.

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It's a wider issue.  If I request

http://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=etc%etc

(typed into the address bar) the % gets encoded to %25 in the process of being redirected to https: - which isn't what you want if it's part of a code already.

This could break external links and bookmarks to the site.

 

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RJ, thank you for identifying the issue! You and Ellen make things so easy for me.

I updated the template so it uses https. This has fixed the problem with the TOC.

We will need to fix the deeper redirect issue, though. That's on the to-do list. Thanks again, RJ.

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Thanks, Chris -- and RJ!

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This should now be fixed.

Thank you again, RJ and Ellen. You are both remarkably valuable contributors to G2G.