Stop repeating yourself, iChat! Stop repeating yourself, iChat!

March 30, 2008 1:07 PM

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!

posted by bjork24 to Technology (10 answers total)

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.
posted by Class Goat at 1:44 PM on March 30, 2008

Response by poster: 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.
posted by bjork24 at 1:55 PM on March 30, 2008

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.
posted by bcwinters at 2:12 PM on March 30, 2008

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).
posted by scottreynen at 2:18 PM on March 30, 2008

What happens when you leave off the http://?
posted by emelenjr at 2:19 PM on March 30, 2008

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

Grrr. This is frustrating.
posted by bjork24 at 2:46 PM on March 30, 2008

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.
posted by Class Goat at 3:22 PM on March 30, 2008

Response by poster: Manually typing a url creates the same problem. Very strange indeed.
posted by bjork24 at 3:30 PM on March 30, 2008

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!
posted by mynameismandab at 3:44 PM on March 30, 2008

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.
posted by DJWeezy at 4:30 PM on March 30, 2008