absolute urls in node/XXX/track

This is impossible: l() always calls check_url() on the $path after it is passed through url(). Something very fishy is going on. Most likely url() is not seeing the referrer as an external URL.

I believe the problem is this line in function url():

if (strpos($path, ':') !== FALSE && filter_xss_bad_protocol($path) == $path) {

For referrers (or any other full url), the first condition (searching for ':') would be true, but the second condition would fail if there are, for instance, ampersands (common in many referrers, specially those coming from search engines).

Chaging the status because the patch won't work for the reason described by Steven.

I'm not sure we should be passing full external URLs to l() or url() anyways - their docs and code suggest they only care about internal URLs, aliases, and paths. That seems to be the brunt of the problem - it's fiddling too much with something it shouldn't be fiddling with.

then the docs is out of date. l and url now does external.

admin/logs/referrers continues to work for me, on external links, with GET params. This means one of two things. Either '<a href="'. check_url($referrer->url) .'">' is the right answer for this bug, or admin/logs/referrers is doing something wrong.

Incidentally, how does removing BASE break external URLs? Yes, this is a bug, but I fail to
see how BASE would have any effect whatsoever on URL encoding in url() or l().

see also: http://drupal.org/node/45064

bump... so did anyone figure out what was going on here? does ber's patch work or not?
Is this even a valid bug? Can anyone who's using statistics reproduce?

This is the way I would do it too - the proper fix is faar too convoluted, IMO, for 4.7, and involves rewriting the internals of url() to check for GET parameters in the $path (when it expects those in $query). The current patch makes the behavior the same as on admin/logs/referrers (see also comment #7). Setting RTBC - once committed, we should reset this to active, so that we remember to work on url() for 4.8 with stronger absolute URL support, and static files (such that you can create .css and image links without having ?q= appended).

IMHO, code needs work, reasons:

1) the patch has removed the column width check.
2) the referrer is render in other places, each with its own method. lack of consistency.

I'll try to roll a patch that fixes those issues.

Erm. The column width checker is still there, and the referrer is now using the same approach as admin/logs/referrers. What exactly are you working on?

Morbus, you're right. The width check is present in the patch. I was confused because it isn't present in another place where the referrer is printed.

I have created a wrapper function, so the referrer is printed the same way everywhere. Feel free to discard, if the approach is not correct.

I'm fine with this approach. Berkes?

Sometimes we do want to show the complete URL. Sometimes (in table views) we only want to show part of the URL.
Making all code use the width check is not advised imo.

+1 for Ber's last patch... it fixes the problem...

Dries, if that's the case, then the patch in #12 is RTBC.

Although I agree #12 is good to do... let me try another version that specifies a greater width for the log access details table.

The   is motivated by a comment in the "Empty Cells in a Table" section of this page:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp

And here's a patch which actually addresses the problem's source rather than adding in yet another ugly hack...

-1 on the original.

+1 for that.

Commited to HEAD.