How can I prevent a link from happening?
Asked by Susan Hazlett:

Before the wiki "upgrade" which prevents any editing via markup now, I could edit my page to prevent an automatic link from happening. Now I can't, and cannot find out how to do this within the User's Guide. My problem is that I have a line of text with the following:

UTF-8 Regex Test (w/ UTF-8),

And the second instance of UTF-8 appears as if it were an autolink to a Jira issue. I've seen this a couple of times with various forms of XXX-99 text strings, and no longer can fix this to \*not\* be a link.

Can someone point me in the right direction on how to fix this in the "new and improved" wiki editor? I tried to escape the dash, (UTF\\-8) as was once an option in wiki markup, but that just shows me the literal text... not a nice formatting option.


Answers:
author: Ewan Willis
body: Put a backslash in front of the hyphen i.e. for instances of UTF-8 you should type out as UTF\\-8 to avoid autolink voodoo

comments: author: Brandon G
body: This should be the actual accepted-answer because it is correct and resolves the users problem without creating a new problem.


author: Andy Hurley
body: Except that it doesn't work! At least, not in our 7.3.3 on premis instance.

If I prefix a - with a \\ I get \\- displayed. No link but still not the text I wanted.

e.g. I have an Epic name with this:

FR\\-01 Approve draft consent order with no amendment

If I remove the \\ it makes it a link to a withdrawn issue called FR-01 which not only is a link to something irrelevant, it also has a line through it.


author: Maximilian Nyman
body: The automatic link creation is extremely annoying for me and the fact that there's nothing (reasonable) I can do in my text to prevent it is just crazy.

Any news about when this will be sorted?

Thanks,  
Max


author: Michael Knight
body: This is caused by <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-27814>. I'm pushing to get this fixed at the moment. Feel free to watch/vote/comment on the issue.


author: Rich Glazier
body: Any real answer to this? long dash and slashes don't work. This is like MS Word c.1998, where the software is smarter than you. I want to paste plain text, and not have it be interpreted as a hyperlink. Thank you for the help.


author: Ben Shamsian
body: Another quick option is to not use minus "-" and instead use EM/Long dash "--".

so you would enter PJ--123 - visually it looks very similar and Jira will not make it into a link.

comments: author: chris
body: You can also insert an invisible zero width space to disable the link, e.g. PJ-\&#8203;123 will appear as PJ-123 (or at least it works in JIRA)


author: SimonS
body: Hi Susan,

I'm sorry for the trouble with the new editor.

You can prevent the link from happening by including the text in the {noformat} macro.

This is not ideal - it puts a box around the noformat area, but it will stop the link.

This is one of the many usability problems we're going to fix with the Confluence editor in the coming months. Please bear with us!

-Simon

comments: author: Timo Rumland
body: Has this issue been resolved already? How can I prevent such automatic link?

We have several tables with hardware model information like "PJ-123" and Confluence generates JIRA issue links.

Is there any other solution to that ugly {noformat} macro (it's just not bearable in tables)?


author: Varun Nedumaran
body: How to make the JIRA hyperlink disable .We are using JIRA 6.4.