Link Clean — Remove extraneous information from URLs

[heyJoeCampbell]

Hi @vitor

 

Can you please update it to work on Google Docs, it currently converts the URL to:

 

https://accounts.google.com/v3/signin/identifier

[vitor]

I don’t use Google Docs, so I need a real URL to see what they look like.

[heyJoeCampbell]

Here's a sample URL:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tT0ihbvxU2DWpq4ZcQeQBFtMdQ3R9Otuu6aw-jrwebg/edit

 

The workflow delivers the following URL:

https://accounts.google.com/v3/signin/identifier

[vitor]

I can’t reproduce that, that link works fine for me. Presumably because it’s public. It’s normal that on a private link that would require logging in, it would redirect to the sign in page when following redirects, which seems to be your result.

 

But there’s nothing about your original URL which would be detected as tracking information anyway, so you can just not run the workflow on it.

[heyJoeCampbell]

This is a better representation (anchor for heading)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tT0ihbvxU2DWpq4ZcQeQBFtMdQ3R9Otuu6aw-jrwebg/edit#heading=h.4x4fizyo8vj2

 

It's the anchor that I would like removed from the URL, so that the visitor starts at the top of the document.

 

Is the workflow processing the URL by accessing it from a server?

If not, whether the URL is public or private should not matter, if it's merely performing a local Regex to clean the URL (which is my assumption of how the workflow operates).

[vitor]

3 hours ago, heyJoeCampbell said:

It's the anchor that I would like removed from the URL

 

That’s out of scope. The workflow removes cruft; anchors have a useful purpose. If you want a workflow to remove anchors, use a Replace Utility to Replace [regex] [#.*] with [].

3 hours ago, heyJoeCampbell said:

Is the workflow processing the URL by accessing it from a server?

 

No, it’s simply asking curl to follow redirects so you end up with the true link, not a minified one which can still have tracking.

 

3 hours ago, heyJoeCampbell said:

whether the URL is public or private should not matter

 

It does, because a private URL will redirect to something else than a public one.

 

3 hours ago, heyJoeCampbell said:

if it's merely performing a local Regex to clean the URL

 

It’s not. That wouldn’t be enough to clean the cruft, as per above. This is explained in the workflow’s About and all pages where it is shared (GitHub, Gallery, first post of this forum thread). It’s the last sentence:

 

Quote

Redirects are followed before cleaning and the result is pasted to the frontmost app.

 

[heyJoeCampbell]

Thank you - this addition to the workflow works perfectly.

 

Will this addition get overwritten upon updating the workflow?

 

 

 

[vitor]

34 minutes ago, heyJoeCampbell said:

Will this addition get overwritten upon updating the workflow?

 

Yes. But updates to this workflow aren’t too common, it’s fairly stable. You can double-click the workflow in the list to change its Bundle Id and it will no longer receive updates.

[heyJoeCampbell]

Thanks @vitor

[gatto]

Hi! Is the playlist metadata in a YouTube link interpreted as cruft? It is for me, always. When I share a YouTube link with friends I don't want to have the link include the playlist I was watching.

 

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcZtPnrvt-Q&list=PLjCmpCzTA54PlnXWOxLDlq5SLV3Zkv81-&index=9

 

To me, I would like this cleaned to a simple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcZtPnrvt-Q

 

Right now (it's not indicative of anything, but for completeness) link clean does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch

 

Thanks ☺️

 

[vitor]

I’ll consider whitelisting YouTube URLs, but I haven’t bumped into one with non-meaningful parameters so they don’t require cleaning.

 

17 hours ago, gatto said:

To me, I would like this cleaned to a simple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcZtPnrvt-Q

 

That would remove useful information and is thus out of scope. See above but use &.* instead of #.*.