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I was sent a hyperlink to a Tableau Public link by a client. When I tried opening it, I got a 404 exception. I wrote back to the client but was told by the same that the link was working fine. I visited his profile page and was able to open the presentation there, but the URL that ended up working was slightly different than the one behind the original, non-functioning link.

Here's the anonymized URL behind the original link

https://public.tableau.com/profile/[client_name]%23!/vizhome/Project-AirportDelay/FlightPerformancesinUSA?publish=yes

And here's the URL via the profile page:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/[client_name]#!/vizhome/Project-AirportDelay/FlightPerformancesinUSA

The only differences I see are ?publish=yes and %23!. I tried appending the former, ?publish=yes, to the working URL, and it was still functional. So I suspect that it has to do with the other difference %23! vs. #!. Could the first work because he is opening it from his computer where he is likely logged onto Tableau Public? What's the difference between these syntax? Any ideas about why the original hyperlink might not be functional?

For obvious privacy reasons, I can't provide the whole URL.

halfer
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Conner M.
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2 Answers2

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It looks like the basic URL pattern for passing filters ?publish=yes

and

%23 is the URL encoded representation of #

aduguid
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  • `#` is in the ASCII character set. In trying to figure out why it might get converted to the % encoding it occurred to me that the link was pasted in a text document that was later converted to PDF. Do you know if PDF conversions have difficulty with the `#`? – Conner M. May 28 '18 at 02:03
  • Are you using IE as your browser? – aduguid May 28 '18 at 02:15
  • Actually, I'm using Chrome. – Conner M. May 28 '18 at 10:11
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    Sorry, got sidetracked. The # to %23 looks like a known bug in Adobe. It has to do with how the PDF is created. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1398769 – aduguid May 29 '18 at 11:58
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The first # after the authority component starts the fragment component. If the # should be part of the path component or the query component, it has to be percent-encoded as %23.

As # is a reserved character, these URIs aren’t equivalent:

http://example.com/foo#bar
http://example.com/foo%23bar

There are countless ways how a URI reference could become erroneous. The culprit is often a software, like a word processor, where someone pastes the correct URI, and the software incorrectly percent-encodes it (maybe assuming that the user didn’t paste the real/correct URI).

Copy-pasting the URI from the browser address bar into a plain text document should always work correctly.

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unor
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