Need to create links to MS-DOS/Windows File System files

[Ronald Oakes]

The Legacy editor for Confluence Spaces has an severe limitation, at least in our team's  usage, when creating hyperlinks.  Specifically, it performs an automatic substitution of the backslash character used in DOS/Windows filesystems as a directory separator character. This character is replaced with "%5C" which is a valid replacement in many circumstances.

However, in order to properly create a URL to reference a file on a Windows file system, the URL must actually contain the backslash character.  That is the URL must be in the form "file:///\\dir1\dir2\dir3" or "file:///\\dir1\dir2\file.ext"  This prevents putting links to files and directories into spaces pages.  The paths to these can still be included, but the user must manually copy and paste the path into Windows Explorer or similar to get to the referenced file or directory.

Is there a work around for this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, but it's not because of Confluence, it's because of the limitations of Windows file addressing - they're not valid in urls without encoding.  There's no way for Confluence to work around non-standard characters in links.