Formgrader does display submissions when the notebook includes a #

[mrvillage]

Hello!

We're having an issue right now where one of our notebooks contains a hashtag (01 Grammar for #a ≥ #b (NLTK) [4 points]), somewhere along the way in the frontend/backend everything after the first # is being stripped, after doing some debugging it looks like it's on the frontend when encoding the notebook_id in URLs, rather than using encodeURIComponent it just appends the text to the end of the URL resulting in half the assignment name being taken as the HTML anchor (and not sent to the server).

I'm happy to try to create a PR for this but I'm not sure all the places where this problem would be present so would love any guidance or if there's any chance you'd be able to get it fixed.

Thank you!

[perllaghu]

You'll find that assignment names, and notebook-document names, cannot contain any regex special characters - specifically ()[]{}\/*?+ (technically, . is also a special character, but it means any character so normally just happens to work - the # is a new one to me....

.... though your comment on it being in the frontend URL clarifies it for me: the URL https://example.com/somewhere#specific breaks down as

• https:// : using the secure http protocol
• example.com : on the named server
• /somewhere : look up this path/page
• #specific : jump down to the id/named element on that page

.... so 01 Grammar for #a ≥ #b (NLTK) [4 points] is "jump to id 'a' on url '01 Grammar for '"

[mrvillage]

Yes exactly! I did some digging and found that somewhere when request URLs in the JavaScript it just does ... + notebook_id to construct the URL, resulting in the browser dropping everything after the #. I'm not sure where but that truncated notebook ID ends up being used in future requests (like the page for submissions to a question) as the actual value of notebook_id. I managed to patch our instance for this by just overriding notebook_id for the specific notebook, but a more general solution or anything would be lovely (it's properly decoded on the backend if it's URL encoded by the frontend).