Setting replace=yes has unpredictable effects on posts/add

[dlo]

If I set replace=yes for posts/add, Delicious is sometimes adding a new bookmark even if an existing bookmark with the specified URL already exists in my collection, and sometimes throws a 500 with no error message.

URL that adds a new bookmark: http://www.edudemic.com/6-ways-students-can-collaborate-with-ipads/

URL that throws a 500: http://www.zeldman.com/2014/03/09/evolving-responsive-web-design/?utm_content=bufferfdcaa&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[vjkaruna]

Hi Dlo -
The second link works for me (see my account https://delicious.com/vjkaruna ) although remember the "&" symbols in the URL need to be URL-encoded if you intend to preserve them. If you do not URLencode, the HTTP GET call cannot differentiate between API parameters and URL parameters.
For the second link, make sure the URL in the "&url=" param that you are replacing is identical. Delicious will attempt to canonicalize URLs to make them similar, for example removing a port ":80" from a HTTP URL. Querying "posts/all" should tell you the exact URL to replace.
I can also take a look if you list your Delicious account.
-vj

[dlo]

Thanks! Will follow up in a few.

[dlo]

Here's the exact request I'm making for the second URL:

https://api.delicious.com/v1/posts/add?description=Evolving%20Responsive%20Web%20Design%20%E2%80%93%20Jeffrey%20Zeldman%20Presents%20The%20Daily&extended=&replace=yes&shared=yes&tags=article%20design%20reference&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeldman.com%2F2014%2F03%2F09%2Fevolving-responsive-web-design%2F%3Futm_content%3Dbufferfdcaa%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_source%3Dtwitter.com%26utm_campaign%3Dbuffer

And here's output from my posts/all--if you look at the first two bookmarks you'll see that it's the same URL, duplicated. My account is "lionheartsw". Thanks!

<posts tag="" total="8" user="lionheartsw">
    <post description="6 Ways Students Can Collaborate With iPads - Edu" extended="" hash="5ad5c653e3cd70cd5e0786636bcad5ad" href="http://www.edudemic.com/6-ways-students-can-collaborate-with-ipads/" private="no" shared="yes" tag="collaborate ipad" time="2014-04-25T15:03:09Z"/>
    <post description="6 Ways Students Can Collaborate With iPads - Edudemic" extended="" hash="6f46a71b61cfcce1a75c0bd801fea5ad" href="http://www.edudemic.com/6-ways-students-can-collaborate-with-ipads/" private="yes" shared="no" tag="collaborate ipad" time="2014-03-10T17:32:54Z"/>
    <post description="Evolving Responsive Web Design – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report" extended="" hash="404d0f9e356143f0e503b0e21444a6d3" href="http://www.zeldman.com/2014/03/09/evolving-responsive-web-design/?utm_content=bufferfdcaa&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer" private="no" shared="yes" tag="article design reference" time="2014-03-10T17:32:33Z"/>
    <post description="sweetnbake.com" extended="" hash="48e2bd95f94621f1db0a3cf66e554b2f" href="http://sweetnbake.com/apple-streusel-melts/" private="no" shared="yes" tag="apple sweets" time="2014-03-10T17:32:20Z"/>
    <post description="Securelist - Information about Viruses, Hackers and Spam" extended="" hash="00c8846b9cad76c51de473e567729746" href="http://www.securelist.com/en/" private="no" shared="yes" tag="antivirus malware security" time="2014-03-10T17:32:14Z"/>
    <post description="reddit: what's new online" extended="" hash="b19d8eee8d2c4e4062d9242b94a7da61" href="http://www.reddit.com/" private="yes" shared="no" tag="reddit news popular article" time="2014-02-04T17:36:25Z"/>
    <post description="MacStories" extended="Last week, I was looking at the way I use Safari and save links to other apps and services, and I realized that I wanted a unified action menu to group some of my most used bookmarklets together. While this can be done by creating a bookmark folder in Safari, folders require too many taps on the iPhone and I’d like to have better visual differentiation between actions with unique icons for each one of them. That seemed like a good opportunity to test the capabilities of Launch Center Pro (now on the iPad as well) when it comes to lists and JavaScript, so I got to work." hash="5e4b3201ebc915f8431c7219bef9749c" href="http://www.macstories.net/" private="no" shared="yes" tag="pythonista apple ios" time="2014-02-04T17:36:00Z"/>
    <post description="apple.com" extended="iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display. Two ways to your valentine’s heart." hash="0f82f8155826020d153245b61160ed4e" href="http://www.apple.com/" private="no" shared="yes" tag="apple ipad iphone" time="2014-02-04T17:35:35Z"/>
</posts>

[vjkaruna]

In the second URL, it appears to be an issue with the "long hyphen" character (encoded as "%E2%80%93%") in your description field. I'll see why that might cause issues with our redirect, but in the meantime you should be able to save by avoiding or encoding that character differently.

For the first URL, it appears to be some issue where a previously saved version of that link ended up with a different MD5 hash - I'll take a look.

[dlo]

I'm not sure how else I can encode that character. What would you suggest?

And yep, removing that character did it. Is there a list of invalid characters that cannot be set in description fields? Is it ascii only?

As for the first URL, any update there?

[dlo]

@vjkaruna are you still lead on this or should I reach out to one of the Science people?

[tonioriol]

As commented in: https://github.com/zmanring/chrome-ext-delicious/issues/55 the only solution is a "hack". For the parameter "url" with non ascii characters, the best choice is double urlencode the value, works perfectly (as far as I've tried). But for the "description" and "extended" parameters, the only way is to remove/replace the non-ascii characters. Because i observed that the double urlencoding works with all characters that i've tried except "í" and "ó". I didn't try all the non-ascii characters one by one, so I think the best workaround is to delete them.

Hope it helps!

And please, the people who maintain this api, fix these errors please!

[peoplemerge]

I hope to carve out most of next week to fix issues like this. Please keep up the comments!

[tonioriol]

Oh! That is really cool @peoplemerge! I've started to build a Laravel package wrapper for the delicious api, and i spent hours and hours trying to figure out why this is happening.

When this problem is fixed, I will publish the package.