Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2026 September 7

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September 7

Why does a URL change to a description even with plain text?

My Yahoo email account has changed. I used to be able to go back to the old way of doing things but I don't see a way to do that now.

My main reason for using it is to send myself information such as text of newspaper articles. I finally figured out how to convert to plain text.

But the information also includes URLs and sometimes when I copy them I get a description of what the URL is for, which is likely useless. If I can click on the description and get the web site I'm looking for, that's fine. But I don't know if that will work. I have to make sure the URL is really the URL.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:42, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Can you more completely describe what you're doing? I don't understand how the URL wouldn't be the URL or what that has to do with your email client. If you're on a website and you want to, say, forward the article or keep a record of it, could you not just copy the URL from your address bar? Most websites have a share function (which comes in handy for articles or pages where the "real" address is a mess of dynamic gobbledygook). But none of that really has anything to do with your email. What happens when you try to perform the same function and paste into a Word document or text file? Matt Deres (talk) 13:50, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Essentially, MattDe is asking which app or website you use to send emails. In solidarity, Aaron Liu (talk) 13:56, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, but even more basically I'm trying to figure out if the problem is with the email client at all, versus a poorly designed "share" function. Like, does the problem exist before the email client got involved? Matt Deres (talk) 16:27, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't know what a share function has to do with anything, and I don't use an email client. The URL at the top of the screen is https://mail.yahoo.com/ plus other information that is probably private. In each case I copy the URL that I want to save from the address bar. I don't know what a share function has to do with anything. This is how I do it, and it should work. I am not going to paste anything into a Word document or text file because these don't serve the purpose. Yahoo email always worked before when I tried to do this.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:55, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Sometimes I send someone an email with a link, such as from YouTube, and for some obscure reason it posts a description rather than the bare URL. But the description can be linked because it's overlaid on the actual URL. If you want to send just the URL, one trick is to first post it in a plaintext object such as a Notepad item. Or just open your Wikipedia user page in edit mode and post it there. Then copy the URL into it, copy what you just posted, and then paste that new thing into your email. Maybe there's a setting you can use to make this task easier. But my method works, anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing&action=edit&section=8 ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:02, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't want to have to copy the URL twice. I go to a Wikipedia edit screen or something else I know will give me real plain text, and copy again. I just want to copy whatever I copy as plain text. I've had formatted information completely mess things up and even freeze the computer. But copying a URL as is does not seem like too much to ask. Plain text should be plain text.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:55, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Many editors have a feature where if you right-click on the editor box, you have "paste plain text" or sometimes "paste special" that opens up a submenu with "plain text" in it. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 11:19, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Correct and it gets even worse. I've seen clients that take a screenshot of the URL's web page and place that image where all I wanted is just a plain URL - no description - no screenshot. I find it frustrating because I don't know who it helps. If I say: Hey Bugs, check out the car I found at http://coolcars.com/listing=12345 ... that is the EXACT message I want to send. I don't want it to obliterate it with descriptions or thumbnails because Bugs won't look at my message and be completely confused. He is more than 5 days old and less than 200 years old. He knows what a link is. He knows how to click on it. He doesn't need some pathetic overlay to handhold him through the process. Reminds me of Clippy - claims to be helping me, but it isn't helping anything at all. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 16:24, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

I think the issue is that some websites insist on pushing extra info to the copy buffer accompanying the selected text. I see the same phenomenon copying selected text from browser windows to plain-text editors, such as Vim.  ​‑‑Lambiam 18:04, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

How are you doing the paste? Are you typing ctrl-V, or right-clicking and selecting Paste, or something else? If you right-click, is there an option that says "paste as plain text" or something like that? CodeTalker (talk) 22:38, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Ha! It turns out that in my email (Outlook), right-click has a "Paste" option, and I can then select a plain-text paste, URL-only. Can't say about Yahoo, of course. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:35, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

I use Hotmail which is often called Outlook (I don't use that term because it is also software) and I decided not to try plain text there. I think it caused more problems than it solved. If I'm not mistaken I ended up with a very, very, very wide email which was useless for what I was trying to do.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:24, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

I use Outlook as my PC's mailer. Don't know from Hotmail. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:19, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

The only difference between HotMail users and Outlook users are their email addresses: jdoe@hotmail.com versus jdoe@outlook.com. They use the same software.  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:54, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

If you're using Outlook online, sure. But my email address from my PC is [my name]@[my internet provider]. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:46, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

That is an issue. We don't know if he is using the Outlook email program or an Outlook website or if he personally decided to say Outlook when he's talking about Thunderbird or if he only mentioned Outlook because someone else mentioned it seems like a word to say when talking about email.

As for the "very very wide email" problem: If you copy a URL that is 255 characters long and paste it as plain text, many text editors will keep it as one line, refusing to wrap it, because adding a newline character changes the email.

255? Try 255,000.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:50, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Further, I do not see any explanation as to why he is using email to save URLs. Is it because he is at the library and he wants to see the URLs at home. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 12:54, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

If this is the case, perhaps VC could save the data as a text file onto a USB stick - or perhaps restrictions apply? MinorProphet (talk) 18:47, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

The reverse. I don't want to be responsible for my own printing equipment. And some activities I do at the library, not at home.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:50, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

And no, adding a USB stick that I have to carry around is just complicating things.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:50, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I believe the fundamental issue here is the non-ubiquity of plain text, or the increasing ubiquity of styled text.

Also, it helps to know that (as I understand it) the clipboard in a GUI is typically polymodal. In particular, if you highlight and copy some text, you might get two versions of it in the clipboard: one plain text, one styled text. (And there may be multiple styled versions, with varying levels of styling. For example, if you copy text in a word processor such as Microsoft Word, you might end up with a clipboard containing a plain-text version, a generically-styled version, and a version containing every Word-specific formatting detail. There's probably also a convention to save an HTML version, if applicable.)

And then, when you paste the text somewhere else, what happens depends on the capabilities of the app you're pasting into. If the target app knows nothing about styling, it will use the plain-text version. But if it does know about styling, it can use a styled version, thus preserving styling across the copy/paste operation, even across disparate apps.

What, exactly, do I mean by "styling"? First of all, potentially any text-formatting attribute: bold/italics, font size, color, etc.

But then — and just recently I've noticed this happening more often, myself — it's also possible to treat a URL or other link as a particular form of styled text, consisting of (1) the link itself and (2) the text to display. We're used to that on Wikipedia, of course, where a link such as cat can show one thing but link to another. In many markdown languages there are similar conventions such as [display text](link).

So with all that background out of the way, we can address @Vchimpanzee:'s question.

If you have (1) a link in some text which consists of both a URL and some descriptive text, displayed by an app which understands this distinction, and (2) an OS whose clipboard model includes a styled-text variant capable of representing this concept, and (3) a destination app which also understands this concept and is prepared to accept that particular styled-text variant from the clipboard, then you're apt to see precisely the phenomenon that Vchimpanzee is experiencing.

And, while I share Vchimpanzee's frustration, it's worth noting that this is not considered a bug. Most people would consider it useful to preserve styling in text, or at least most of the time. And HTTP URLs were never intended for human consumption: they were supposed to be a behind-the-scenes implementation detail, and it's only been the 30-year-long ongoing failure of web software to properly hide them that has caused us to assume we have to be able to see and manipulate them directly. (But, don't worry, I share this frustration; I like to be able to see and manipulate them directly, too, and I'm annoyed when they're "helpfully" hidden from me.)

So, bottom line, what can you do about this? My solution, instead of copying text from app A and pasting into app B, is to use an intermediate hop through a rigorously text-only app C to "scrape off" any unwanted text styling. That is, I copy from app A and paste into app C, then reselect and copy from app C and finally paste into app B. As long as app C doesn't understand styled text, it will select the plain-text variant placed in the clipboard by app A, and then when reselecting and copying from app C, there will only be a plain-text variant and so app B will have to use that in the end.

My choices for the intermediate "App C" are typically emacs, or TextEdit on the Mac, or Notepad on Windows, or sometimes even one of the shell windows I've always got open.

But there's sort of an underlying "arms race" which keeps this task challenging. Vchimpanzee spoke of "plain text", as if they believed they were pasting into a plain-text app ("App B" in my formulation) and so effecting an immediate styled-to-plain-text conversion that way. I suspect what happened is that a recent upgrade to Vchimpanzee's App B helpfully taught it about styled text (or specifically about named links within styled text), which is when Vchimpanzee started having this problem. Me, when using the workaround I described, I've occasionally had to evolve my choice of intermediate App C's to use, when new versions of my App C stopped being so plain-texty. (GNU Emacs, formerly a preëminent plain-text editor, is pretty far down this road by now.)

Finally, although this has been phrased as an answer, I have two questions for anyone who knows about this stuff (and is still with me): First, is my description of "polymodal" clipboards still accurate? (It's how MacOS worked, back in the 90's, pre-Darwin, which is when I learned about it, but I haven't heard about it since.) And, does this functionality have a proper name? —scs (talk) 14:02, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Answering my own question, our article at Clipboard (computing) suggests that these days it's still somewhat as I described, but much more complicated (of course). —scs (talk) 14:05, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

There is no App A. There is no App B. There is no App C. There is no app. I don't do apps.

The real question is why Yahoo thinks they can make such a change. Their plain text was real plain text for decades. I don't like having to recopy to make it work. And I have to find a place to recopy. A Wikipedia edit window usually works.

A new problem: I've copied text or URLs and for reasons I don't understand, it doesn't appear where I copied it to. I find it in a totally different place.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:47, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Well, none of us know what Yahoo thinks. If there were a universal crystal ball, we would be using it. Could you please do us all a particular favour, and just for once give us a very specific example of what exactly you are talking about? I find it in a totally different place. No bollocks, no complaining, no pretending to be confused: please provide a complete and actual example of what you mean, as above. We are not mind readers. We cannot possibly imagine what your problem is unless you tell us explicitly, in meaningful words. The disconnect between what happens to you, and the way you describe it and expect us to understand, is abysmal. Why not just employ a technically competent person to physically sit beside you and point out what's happening? MinorProphet (talk) 22:27, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

Of course there is an app. Everything that you do on a computer is in an app. If you're accessing your mail in a browser, then the browser is the app, and it would be helpful to tell us which browser you're using. The change in behavior that you're seeing may be because of a change in the Yahoo email page, or it may be because of a change in your browser, or it may be something else. Your description of the issue in this thread has been very vague and hard to follow. Earlier above you said "I just want to copy whatever I copy as plain text." But then when I suggested using a "paste as plain text" option, you said "I decided not to try plain text there.", and I don't understand at all what you mean by that, or if it was even a response to me. I also have no idea what you mean in your latest comment "it doesn't appear where I copied it to. I find it in a totally different place." Can you just explain step by step, as MinorProphet asked, what sequence of actions you are taking and what you see on the screen after each action? In enough detail that someone reading it could exactly reproduce your actions and see the same thing? CodeTalker (talk) 22:55, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

..adding a USB stick that I have to carry around is just complicating things. That's evidently a valid option, but you seem to be rejecting it. But genuinely, how difficult is that? Circumstances may have changed utterly, and it may be that there's nothing you can do about it, despite all our advice. You may need to adapt. Some people refuse to be helped. MinorProphet (talk) 15:22, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

"A new problem" belongs in a new discussion. It does not help anyone to ask for help with a problem, refute all help offered, and expand the discussion to another problem, then another problem, then another problem. This is not a "vent about technology" discussion forum. Just a few highlights from your many threads here: When you asked for help with a Flash update in Firefox, you refuted all assistance and moved on to complaint about advertisements, screen behavior, browser behavior, and other library computers. When you complained about the back/forward behavior in the web browser, you refuted all assistance and moved on to complain about various websites, listing out everything that annoyed you about the general Internet. When you asked for help because Internet Explorer stopped working, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about email, Yahoo, Firefox, the library, spyware, and Norton. When you asked for help with an annoying AT&T ad, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about Flash, the purpose of advertising, and animations. When you asked for help with the backwards E, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about the the hourglass cursor, library staff, cell phones, and web popups. When you asked for assistance with saving a file, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about file browser layouts, library computers, email, copyrights, and Wikipedia formatting. When you asked for help with Meraki, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about advertisements in general. When you asked for help with an alert to update Flash, you refuted all assistance and went on to complain about advertisements once again. In this thread, you asked for assistance with pasting URLs into an email. You have refuted all assistance. Now, you are trying to expand your complaints beyond the problem. If you honestly want your problems solved, focus on the one problem you asked about. Answer the information questions asked. Attempt to follow the advice given. Then, start a new discussion to solve a different problem. That change in how you work with this reference desk should help you solve problems rather then simply rant about them. ~2026-46630-01 (talk) 13:59, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

There does seem to be a trend here. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:17, 15 September 2026 (UTC)