Trick to handling %s in bookmark keyword

[CyberSlug]

I love the bookmark keyword quicksearch feature of Mozilla/Firefox, but I've sometimes wanted to override what happens if %s is null.

For example, change the built-in Wikipedia Quicksearch bookmark to point to

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javascript:if('%s'==String.fromCharCode(37,115)) location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page'; else location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s';

Not only can you type in wp something to look up something, but you can also just type wp to go directly to Wikipedia's homepage!


Similar example for slashdot:

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javascript:if('%s'==String.fromCharCode(37,115)) location.href='http://slashdot.org/'; else location.href='http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s';

And google:

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javascript:if('%s'==String.fromCharCode(37,115)) location.href='http://www.google.com/'; else location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=%s';

This trick obviously requires javascript to be enabled, and you'll notice the entire bookmarklet will appear in the URL bar until the web page loads.
Hope this is useful to someone

[Zoolcar9]

or add a prompt

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javascript:if('%s'!=String.fromCharCode(37,115)) location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=%s'; else { q=window.prompt('Query:'); if(q!=null) location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=' + q; }; void 0

[CyberSlug]

Thanks for the addition, Zoolcar9

I just realized it would be shorter to replace String.fromCharCode(37,115) with '%'+'s'.

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javascript:if('%s'=='%'+'s') location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page'; else location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s';

In case you are wondering how this works, when you type the keyword searchterm into the location bar, the %s is replaced with any searchterm. If nothing is provided, %s literally equals percent sign lowercase s. So we check for the %s condition and update the location bar with whatever address we want to go to.

[logan]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175419
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253457

I imagine these will be fixed by a prompt rather than a dialog with something complicated/confusing, like being able to define multiple actions depending...

You could shorten 'em up a bit like so:

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javascript:location.href=('%s'=='%'+'s')?'http://host/':'http://host/q=%s';

Good stuff, I imagine I'll be making use of these shortly.

[logan]

Anyone having problems on two subsequent runs? It'll work the first time in a new tab without fail, but on the second run nothing happens... After that, I cannot get another to work in the same tab, even after visiting a non-js URL.

I tried to come up with a simple testcase like:

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javascript:location.href='http://www.mozilla.org/';

and a few minutes ago the only way I could get this to work reliably was to append <i>void(0);</i>, but now it seems to be working ok.

I ran a quick test in 1.0.7 and didn't experience any problems... Is there something bad with bookmarklets in ~1.5b2? Is it just me?

-- edit

It seems to be caused by my caps rules disabling javascript for www.google.com and imdb.com...

[mariansigler]

At Wikipedia, they have made [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s]/wiki/%s[/url] as a redirect to the main page exactly to fix this problem.

[Samus_]

recent versions of Firefox do not add a literal %s when no keyword is present, it is very good for some cases but there's still the problem of getting a search for an empty string.

for that I propose this alteration of the original idea:

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javascript:if('%s') location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s'; else location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page';