Hi everyone, thank you for your input.  Matt, thanks a lot for the detailed
look into this.  Indeed there are inconsistencies on how this works in Org,
and there are things happening that are system dependent.  I thibk what is
biting me this time is the system dependence which is really weird.

When I, on my Mac, call this from a commandline in bash
$ open
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#search/q=author%3A%22Dominik%2CC%22/metrics

things work.  So I made a little perl program, myopenurl, that looks like
this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$url = join(" ",@ARGV);
system "open \"$url\";

and that does the trick when I put it into browse-url-generic-program.
Fixed for now, but I think the entire url quoting scheme in Org might
deserve another look.

Thanks.

Carsten

On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 7:54 PM, Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> wrote:

> Hi Carsten,
>
> Carsten Dominik <dominik@uva.nl> writes:
>
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have problems opening a link in org.
> >
> > The link looks like this:
> >
> > https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#search/q=author%3A%22Dominik%
> 2CC%22/metrics
> >
> > I have copied it like this from the address bar in a browser.
> >
> > If I click on it in Org-mode, the link is modified to
> >
> > https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/%23search/q=author:%22Dominik,C%22/metrics
> >
> > before being sent to the browser, and the browser cannot resolve it.
> > The problem seems to be that # has been turned into %23
>
> I cannot replicate this on Linux, but there do seem to be some
> inconsistencies with how Org-mode is escaping/unescaping links:
>
> AFAICT, Org-mode itself is not modifying the "#". The relevant lines of
> org-open-at-point are 10747-10748:
>
>       ((functionp (org-link-get-parameter type :follow))
>         (funcall (org-link-get-parameter type :follow) path))
>
> Just simply copying and pasting the link from the browser, I found that
> `path` at the lines above is:
>
> //ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#search/q=author:"Dominik,C"/metrics
>
> Note: the time one gets to this point, the path has already been
> unescaped (see line 10712).
>
> Meanwhile, `type` is...
>
> https
>
> ...which results in org-open-at-point calling the following:
>
> (lambda (path) (browse-url (concat "https:" path)))
>
> However, there are inconsistencies when one turns the pasted url above
> into an actual org-link (e.g., by calling org-insert-link).
>
> Then the link in org-mode looks like this (note that the escape
> percentage characters are themselves escaped, which seems a bit strange
> to me):
>
> [[https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#search/q=author%253A%
> 2522Dominik%252CC%2522/metrics]]
>
> Now when you open at point, the `path` at line 10748 is:
>
> //ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#search/q=author%3A%22Dominik%2CC%22/metrics
>
> Hope this helps in debugging.
> Matt
>