Comments on: Stop repeating yourself, iChat! Stop repeating yourself, iChat!

Question: Stop repeating yourself, iChat! Stop repeating yourself, iChat!

bjork24 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:07:47 -0800

Why does iChat send URLs twice? Whenever I send a URL to someone, it shows up twice on the recipient's side. Is there a way to stop this annoying repetition?

My friend uses Digsby, and my wife uses gTalk, and it does the same thing on both of their respective IM clients.

What I send:
http://ask.metafilter.com

What they get:
http://ask.metafilter.com http://ask.metafilter.com

I'm using iChat 4.0.2 on Leopard, FWIW.

Please hope me!

By: Class Goat

Class Goat — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:44:49 -0800

Just a wild-assed guess: the IM sending program is trying to encode an HTML anchor around the raw text of the URL in order to make it into a link. And the IM receiving program is stripping the HTML tags off, but leaving the URL intact.

By: bjork24

bjork24 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:55:38 -0800

I think you may be right, Class Goat, as the urls pop out looking more like this:

http://www.google.com [http://www.google.com]

I don't see any options in the preferences to change HTML encoding, however.

By: bcwinters

bcwinters — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:12:48 -0800

What you want to do is tell iChat that you want to paste the URL as plain text, not as HTML. I'm on my PC at work right now so I'm not 100% sure if Paste as Plain Text has been added to iChat or not--if not, you can try using this hack.

Alternately, you can paste your URL into a true plain text editor like BBEdit or another program that DOES have a Paste as Plain Text option (like Yojimbo), then copy it again for pasting into iChat. Kinda irritating.

By: scottreynen

scottreynen — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:18:52 -0800

I'm not 100% sure if Paste as Plain Text has been added to iChat or not

There's a "Paste and Match Style" option in iChat on Leopard, which should solve the problem (assuming pasting HTML is the problem).

By: emelenjr

emelenjr — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:19:23 -0800

What happens when you leave off the http://?

By: bjork24

bjork24 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:46:47 -0800

1. "Paste and Match Style" doesn't work
2. Leaving off the http:// results in the URL still be doubled

Grrr. This is frustrating.

By: Class Goat

Class Goat — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:22:05 -0800

Where are you copying the URL from? If this were Windows, the next step to try would be to paste it into NotePad, then recopy from there. That removes the OLE tag encoding, and what you get is just the raw text of the URL for the second paste step. My guess is that it wouldn't be treated in this way.

If you don't have any equivalent to notepad, try manually typing the URL instead of copy-and-pasting it from somewhere else.

By: bjork24

bjork24 — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:30:29 -0800

Manually typing a url creates the same problem. Very strange indeed.

By: mynameismandab

mynameismandab — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:44:34 -0800

I have the same problem when my fiance sends me hyperlinks in google talk client. We both have google talk client, so I don't know why that happens when he sends to me but not when I send to him. I think it must be a setting on his computer, because it's the same way from my laptop or work pc.

So I hope you can find the answer soon! It's so irritating!

By: DJWeezy

DJWeezy — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:30:48 -0800

I don't think it is the formatting from where the link is coming from because I believe it is iChat adding the formating. I get back to you if i can find a way to make it stop.