Stop mail clients auto-linking text as URLs
Wow – it’s been a while since I last posted…
This is just a quickie – a reminder for my own reference, but could also be useful to others.
I’m building a shop, and the email confirmations include the line:
Your credit card statement will show a payment to "MYDOMAIN.COM".Which is fine, except that many mail clients (e.g. Apple Mail) will take MYDOMAIN.COM and link it as a URL – which I don’t want.
To avoid this, simply add a zero width space into the “URL” – for instance:
Your credit card statement will show a payment to "MYDOMAIN​.COM".(That’s the HTML version. If you’re generating a plain text alternative (using CFML, of course), you’ll want to use #Chr(8203)#).
The text will now look identical – except it will not be linked by the mail client.
Posted at 12:03 PM on 9 February, 2010, in HTML, Quick Tips
Great tip! Bookmarking this because I know I'll need it sooner or later...
Good stuff!
Thanks for sharing this hint, which could be used in PHP by declaring that character with:
html_entity_decode('?', ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8')
Other methods failed in PHP version 5.3.3 on Mac OS X 10.6.6:
- dec_to_utf8(8203)
- unicode_chr(8203)
In Outlook 2003 on Windows 2003 (32-bit) the ​ (8203) 'zero width space' displays as an ugly square box instead of not being displayed at all.