# Auto\_link fails to handle tilda's (~) and markdown fails to

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/auto-link-fails-to-handle-tildas-and-markdown-fails-to/50416>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 16, 2005, 2:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/auto-link-fails-to-handle-tildas-and-markdown-fails-to/50416 "2005-12-16T02:08:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![samj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/77aa72/32.png) [@samj](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/samj)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2005, 2:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/auto-link-fails-to-handle-tildas-and-markdown-fails-to/50416/1 "2005-12-16T02:08:28Z")

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Hi There,

So I was just having some trouble with auto\_link and markdown.

Specfically auto\_link was failing to handle urls with tildas in them (~)  
e.g.

[http://www.hawaii.edu/~name/index.html](http://www.hawaii.edu/~name/index.html)

and markdown couldn’t handle an acute accent (`) e.g.

Hawai`i

It seems that acute accents (or backticks) in Markdown signify code  
segments, and it seems there’s an open ticket for this:

> **[dev(E)iate](https://deveiate.org/)**
>
> The personal website of Michael Granger.

However, regarding auto\_link I found where I could fix this in  
actionpack-1.11.0\lib\action\_view\helpersTextHelper.rb

changing the following line:

([\w]+[=?&/.-]?)\* # url segment  
to this

([\w~]+[=?&/.-]?)\* # url segment

I can see that there are a number of tickets relating to auto\_link:

[http://dev.rubyonrails.org/search?q=auto\_link&wiki=on&changeset=on&ticket=on](http://dev.rubyonrails.org/search?q=auto_link&wiki=on&changeset=on&ticket=on)

However I am unclear how to submit this as a fix. Any guidance would be  
greatly appreciated.

I’d also appreciate any pointers on how to run the TextHelper tests to  
ensure I haven’t broken anything else

CHEERS\> SAM