What to do about "Bad URL syntax"?

What to do about "Bad URL syntax"?

[Mathias Dahl]

[I posted this in gnu.emacs.help first but did not notice that this
group existed]

Hi!

> From time to time I get only the text "Bad URL syntax" as message body
when reading news. After a while I figured out that it probably is
because the message is a HTML-message. Not sure though, but I can read
the same post using a "normal" news-reader, and the times I have
bothered to check it has been HTML-messages.

I can live with this though. I tried searching Google for it (like
"bad url syntax gnus") and never find anything useful; it seems only I
have this problem.

Today I wanted to check out the new RSS-support in GNUS, an although
adding the RSS as a group, and listing it, went well, the body of all
"messages" are again "Bad URL syntax".

Has anyone else seen this? What might I do wrong?

I use a quite recent (2005-06-26) CVS Emacs under Windows XP.

/Mathias

Re: What to do about "Bad URL syntax"?

[Mathias Dahl]

Mathias Dahl <brakjoller@gmail.com> writes:

> From time to time I get only the text "Bad URL syntax" as message
> body when reading news. After a while I figured out that it probably
> is because the message is a HTML-message. Not sure though, but I can
> read the same post using a "normal" news-reader, and the times I
> have bothered to check it has been HTML-messages.

OK, I will reply to my own post here:

I could not resist trying to debug this problem. It took two hours and
I had to learn about stuff called Edebug and instrumenting functions
for debugging in the process... :)

It seems the root of the problem is when the mime content is to be
rendered or washed. In my case links was called and it could not parse
the HTML given. Hence the "Bad URL syntax" message, which was from
links.

I copied the file that could not be parse on Windows XP, to my
GNU/Linux box at home and there "links -dump" could grok the
content. Strange...

Anyway, I wanted to solve it so I just tried to see if maybe lynx
would work better. After a while of debugging I found the very
interesting option `mm-text-html-renderer', which I could set to lynx
instead of the default links. This solved my problem and I seem to now
be able to also read HTML-postings in GNUS. Yay!

/Mathias