fields with HTML characters and whitespace lead to mangled urls when used as replacement patterns + fix

I have a text field which I have stored as a piece of custom data in CiviCRM. This is exposed via views and for some (unrelated) reason displays with

tags around it. When I use it as part of a url, embedding it with a replacemtn pattern, I expect this:

/whatever.php?textfield=value

but what I get is:

/whatever.php?textfield=value&textfield=value_

After a lot of poking about if the code, I found the problem in /sites/all/modules/views/handlers/views_handler_field.inc where strip_tags() was leaving whitespace in, that was then getting converted to an underscore by url() (around line 585)

I fixed the problem by inserting this line

$path = trim($path);

at around line 585, leaving it looking like this:

// html_entity_decode removes , so check whether its different to front.
if ($path != '') {
// Use strip tags as there should never be HTML in the path.
// However, we need to preserve special characters like " that
// were removed by check_plain().
$path = strip_tags(html_entity_decode(strtr($path, $tokens)));
$path = trim($path);
}

// If the path is empty do not build a link around the given text and return
// it as is.
if (empty($path)) {
return $text;
}