Comment 5 for bug 810122

Coalwater:
Before going too far, it may be wise to read the appropriate URI and URL RFC's. It appears to me that there is no fool-proof way to do this for all characters the instructor might be adding as punctuation rather than part of the URL, but I don't know that requiring URL's to be encapsulated in < > will work, it's hard to type.

Since whatever we do will have to be approximate, I wonder if looking for whitespace, and then backing out what seems to be punctuation from the end of the resulting URL would work. While an embedded "." is essential (as in http://ubuntu.com) a trailing one is probably punctuation. We will be risking that trailing "." is really part of the URL and not intended as punctuation, but it's much more probable that a trailing "." will be punctuation. A trailing close parenthesis ")" or "]" should also probably be eliminated, too, as should combinations, such as ")." "]." ".)" ".]" ")," ]," .

I'm interested in the thoughts of all others on this.