@testing

[mdlbear]

mailto:foo@example.com foo@example.com
... but that's a special case:  @ with non-blank characters in front of it,
like bar@

Note that links in HTML aren't allowed to nest, so
@foobar is broken.  It should be
<a href="https://example.com/">\@foobar<a>, which should link
the plain text \@foobar to https://example.com/.

@ with a space after it appears to work

@mdlbear okay; let's see what it does to parens:  @(mdlbear)

It gets some of the obvious corner cases right; I think it's just a matter of time before many of the rest get ironed out. Though it would be nice if it didn't touch @'s inside of <pre> elements. Otherwise I'm going to have to write a perl program if I want to post perl programs...

Comments

[jtthomas]

...this is unexpectedly extremely useful to know, so thanks.

[kaberett]

We are Aware of the Perl display issues :-( a comprehensive fix is being specced and worked on; I'm very sorry this wasn't all thought of in advance.

[mdlbear]

And I knew that -- I was mostly just curious, and wanted to see what was already working.

Regular expressions are hard to get right. I recently ran across a site that turned "so..." into a link -- obviously using * where they should have used +.

"I know! I'll solve this problem with a regular expression!"
"Now you have two problems."

Hmm. What about a checkbox that flips the meaning of backslash escapes -- if checked, an unescaped @ would stay untouched, and an escaped one would be linked to a user? Then just set the flag on every post earlier than last month.

[kaberett]

Before _mentions and After _mentions is indeed roughly the implementation people are hashing out, yep!