Hash/Pound-sign/# not escaped in `:title` Permalink, breaking URLs

support
1

I haven’t seen this after Googling around and searching this forum. The closest thing I’ve found is Title used in permalink does not have forward slash escaped · Issue #3577 · gohugoio/hugo · GitHub which references slashes.

So, I thought maybe I’ve just been overlooking something “obvious”?

My config sets posts = ":title" for permalinks.

My post title is as such:

title: "tcg's cool posts #2"

On the list page, the code to display the post and link is:

<span class="post-title"><a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a></span>

The resulting HTML during local dev:

<a href="http://localhost:1313/tcgs-cool-posts-#2/">tcg's cool posts #2</a>

You can probably see that the URL is going to be a 404, because of the unescaped hash mark.

Is this expected?

I would think not, and it doesn’t seem like .Permalink should require its own escaping. I also don’t feel right pre-escaping my post meta values.

Should I file a bug, or am I Doing It Wrong?

EDIT: Was using v0.42.2; seeing the same on v0.43

2

I think the way folks get around those things is by setting :slug in permalinks. That way, it is based on your title unless you set the slug, which you do for the outliers.

3

Yeah, that just doesn’t make sense to me as a default behavior, especially if it doesn’t try to URL escape those values when generating names. Something seems weird about that.

Filed a bug, because it seems strange that a human would always have to be sure they were somehow providing a URL-friendly value: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/4926