Pasting a URL on top of another URL links first URL, not replaces it.

[rhyswynne]

Suppose if I have a URL ​http://www.foo.com/, that I want to replace in a piece of text with ​http://www.bar.com. If I select ​http://www.foo.com and paste over it, rather than replace said URL, it links it instead.

Trivial, really (user can delete old URL & paste new one), but I suppose that most people would prefer having ​http://www.bar.com, rather than
<a href="http://www.bar.com/">http://www.foo.com/</a>.

[DrewAPicture]

Hi @rhyswynne. At its base, this is intended behavior, though I agree this is not a great experience. I actually ran into this myself a couple of times during the 4.2 development cycle before I realized this change had been made. Found it kind of annoying, really.

Personally, I would be in favor of allowing exceptions to the "paste-over linking" effect, such as your example of simply trying to replace a URL in content.

[helen]

I'm not sure I'd expect it to replace. What is the flow here that we've got plain text URLs in the first place? oEmbeds that didn't work?

[rhyswynne]

Replying to helen:

I'm not sure I'd expect it to replace. What is the flow here that we've got plain text URLs in the first place? oEmbeds that didn't work?

Hi Helen,

At the moment it was a shortcode we were using for an internal project that had an image attribute. The shortcode was added as [shortcode backgroundimageurl="​http://www.domain.com/image1.jpg"].... There were multiple instances of said shortcode on the same page, but with different background image urls, so I was copying the shortcodes out, and replacing the backgroundimageurl attribute.

Hope that helps :)

[iseulde]

I agree this is weird. If the selected content is a URL, then we should not link.

[iseulde]

In 32817:

TinyMCE: wplink: don't link a URL with a pasted URL

Fixes #32357.