I’m losing the link property in $Text after an explode
I’ve checked aTBRef re explode but can’t see it being mentioned
Is this odd? expected? avoidable?
tia
Mark
Not ‘expected’, as I can’t replicate that issue here. To confirm assumption, I explode a note—whose $Text contained web links—into paragraphs and the links were still there in the exploded notes. FWIW, I tried $Text with copy/pasted text form a webpage and $Text where typing domain names triggered smart link creation of Tinderbox web links. Both cases worked.
Can you post a small TBX with a note whose $Text gives you this error so others can replicate it—or not.
Thought: have you double checked the blue text at start is a working link and doesn’t just look like a link? I say that as from time to time i’ve tripped myself on that assumption.
Thanks Mark
It is a link yes ( now points to a 404 as the bloody government keep changing web page storage which is ironic given the subject matter!)
It is however a hook link - I wonder if this is the issue?
I’ll do as you suggest unless you confirm that the hook links are the culprit
Many thanks as ever
explodingLinksTest.tbx (152.9 KB)
The test appears to work for both normal links ( pasted from a browser URL ) and hook links
It doesn’t work for the particular note which I’ve included in the test file
Not critical but feels like a learning point to come 
I can replicate the issue with the GOV.UK note. I did notice the URL is >300 characters long:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/bureaucracy-busting-concordat-principles-to-reduce-unnecessary-bureaucracy-and-administrative-burdens-on-general-practice/bureaucracy-busting-concordat-principles-to-reduce-unnecessary-bureaucracy-and-administrative-burdens-on-general-practice#the-7-principles
… though this is well within current allowed URL lengths.
The source note links all work fine though I can’t validate the ‘hook’ link as I don’t have installed the app that uses the ‘readdle-spark://’ pseudo-protocol (PDF Export app perhaps?).
After a lot of experimenting I can’t come up with a consistent cause of failure but sometimes web-links survive explode and sometimes they don’t. I’ve investigated, without clear results:
- overall URL length
- web URLs where the URL is rge link anchor text vs web links with ad hoc anchor text
- in which paragraph the (first) URL appears
- the number of URLs in the source note
It appears to be something internal (pinging @eastgate)
Thanks Mark - I’ll await with interest
I believe that no links survive Explode, except for “smart links” attached to urls in the text.
Am I mistaken?
Yes, I can confirm in-doc Tinderbox text links are lost on Explode.
In truth until today I’d not really thought of links in the context having normally used Explode to work in imported text or things like lists saved into $Text. I can’t recall ever having exploded a note with links. I’m assuming the lack of any description of retention of links reflects that. Of course that doesn’t make OP’s problem wrong, but shows how some things are only obvious after the fact. 
Any update on this, or is there still no possibility to have links survive Explode?
Just tried to sort out all the items that accumulated in my Safari reading list and thought throwing them on Map View would make life easier. Turns out the text of the links remained blue and underlined, but the actual links are all gone.
Anybody got an idea for a workaround?
Explode does not retain Tinderbox basic/text links or any weblinks using anchor text. However, if any text uses an actual URL , e.g. https://www.wikipedia.org, this will be re-detected in the exploded note with that text and a web links auto-created.
What is the source of the ‘Safari reading list’. are you exporting directly from Safri. IOW, where can we go to find a similar list and see what it contains. This steps us past the “an unexpected thing happened using data not everyone can see” problem.
HTH
The list is created directly from Safari.
I used this dialogue to create an HTML file of all bookmarks and reading list entries:
The links will show as titles of the entries in blue, underlined and clickable, i.e. the URL is not visible.
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Ah, OK. I did the same, and saved ‘Safari Bookmarks.html’ to disk. I then dragged the file into Tinderbox and exploded the note created. Took a while as mine came to >900 notes (I need to do some pruning of bookmarks!). Source note:
Exploded item:
How did you import the data? Have you turned off Smart URLs?
So, what you describe should work. But perhaps there are some extra undescribed steps in your process?
Well, this is strange: I tried in a fresh Tinderbox document → worked as fine, as you also experienced.
I then tried in the original location again: it works fine here too now.
If I did not have the exploded notes with broken links, I’d question my sanity. But they are there.
Will post again, if this reoccurs and I can reproduce (… reproduce again, I should say – I tried multiple times before posting here, and always got broken links).
EDIT:
Can reproduce now: the missing extra step was deleting the Bold and big headings “Bookmarks”, “Favourites”, etc. from the note before exploding. If I keep these, it works. If I delete them the links will break.
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