Pasting links in IE8 and IE9 no longer working as expected

[Teresa Monahan]

When pasting links into CKEditor, IE automaticcaly detects the links and converts them into anchor tags. Although the HTML IE generates for this is mal-formed, this used to work quite well in CKEditor. However from 3.5.3 onwards there is a change in this behaviour and extra links are now generated for the pasted content in IE8 and IE9.

To see an example of this, paste the following content (which was generated by IE) into the source view of CKEditor in 3.5.2 and then in 3.5.3. Then switch back to wysiwyg editor and see that the first word on line 2 has been incorrectly converted to a link in the 3.5.3 version.

<P>line 1 <A href="http://www.ibm.comline"><a href="http://www.ibm.com">http://www.ibm.com</a></P>
<P>line</A> 2 <A href="http://ckeditor.com"><a href="http://ckeditor.com">http://ckeditor.com</a></A></P>

We realise that this is essentially a browser issue since the HTML generated is not valid. However we would be interested to know why there is a difference in behaviour between the 2 CKEditor versions. Was there a code change in this area to address another issue? Also, do you think there is any way we could potentially work around this browser limitation for CKEditor 3.5.3 onwards? Any thoughts or comments you have on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Jakub Ś]

"line 2" has been converted in to link in Opera, IE8 and IE9 from CKEditor 3.5.3 rev [6561]

[Garry Yao]

Link (with href attribute) is to be removed when empty.

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

We need a ticket test branch here.

[Garry Yao]

Replying to fredck:

We need a ticket test branch here.

Already had one there, but on that branch a dt was forked instead of a tt.

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

Good to know... enough to point to the test file:
​http://ckeditor.t/dt/core/htmlparser/fragment.html

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

Replying to garry.yao:

Already had one there, but on that branch a dt was forked instead of a tt.

That is proving to be a problem. While the patch fixes the dt test, it makes no difference for the issue reported here.

A tt is definitely needed.

[Garry Yao]

​http://ckeditor.t/tt/7894/1.html

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

The following test was failing after patch and has been fixed on the ticket branch:
​http://ckeditor.t/tt/4614/1.html

[Garry Yao]

Fixed with [7223].