canonicakLink broken?

**gernot** · 5 May 2020, 08:07 AM

Hi,
I am on ZC 1.5.6c, PHP 7.3.15, MariaDB 10.3.22. Site is:
https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/

I think $canonicalLink is broken for products, although it seems to work for categories.
I initially noted that Facebook is having trouble with previewing products, using the Structured Data plugin.
Looking at the canonical URLs generated (with "&" as "&"), I saw that without cPath the links are not valid in my browser even.
But category links are fine. Summary:
https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....04#post1368504

Looking at my site for a product, I have:

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;products_id=188" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;products_id=188&amp;language=ja" hreflang="ja" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;products_id=188&amp;language=en" hreflang="en" />

None of these links is found in Firefox.
Category links have the same issue in Firefox, although they seem to be accepted by Facebook:

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=index&amp;cPath=82" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=index&amp;cPath=82&amp;language=ja" hreflang="ja" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.proteawines.jp/shop/index.php?main_page=index&amp;cPath=82&amp;language=en" hreflang="en" />

Sorry I do not understand the ins and outs of the escaping convention, but I assume an href link should work in a browser.

**gernot** · 5 May 2020, 09:38 AM

Was reading up on href, and it sounds like href supportes unicode in HTML5, so for UTF-8 pages the links could be in English, Japanese, or whatever. And no HTML entities either, as far as I can tell from the pretty hard to read specs. For HTTP, seems one would still need percentage-encoding for path, and punycode for domain names.

Refs:
https://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipa...hyperlink-href
https://url.spec.whatwg.org/

On the other hand, this Google thread indicates "&" must be encoded:
https://support.google.com/webmaster...G8CxjZ0/?hl=fr

Ack, misspelt the thread title!

**DrByte** · 6 May 2020, 10:22 PM

Originally Posted by gernot

I initially noted that Facebook is having trouble with previewing products, using the Structured Data plugin.

Is this the real issue that you're trying to solve?

**gernot** · 7 May 2020, 12:02 PM

Hi Dr Byte,
No, it was the initial problem I was trying to solve. Then I noticed that all the SEO links are the same, it was not that the one for Facebook was different. Looking at the links, with the double escaping "&amp;" and inability to read in browser made me decide to file a bug (though as I wrote I was not sure of the intended format). The fix provided by mc12345678 works, and as I understand it these is some discussion going on about this type of issue elsewhere on the board.