Mobile app autolinker includes markdown bold ** delimiters in URL href, causing 404 on tap

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened May 29, 2026 by artkaseman Closed Jun 1, 2026

Summary

When a URL is rendered wrapped in markdown bold — **https://example.com/path** — the mobile app's autolinker folds the trailing (and/or leading) ** emphasis delimiters into the linked URL's href. Tapping the link navigates to https://example.com/path**, which 404s. Manually stripping the asterisks and visiting the bare URL works. A bare (non-bold) URL renders and links correctly.

Reproduction

  1. Have a rendered assistant message contain a bolded URL, e.g. **https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/65**.
  2. Open it in the Claude Code mobile app.
  3. Tap the link.

Expected: navigates to https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/65
Actual: navigates to https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pull/65** → 404

Analysis / likely root cause

The renderer appears to autolink raw text before resolving markdown emphasis. Because * is a valid RFC 3986 sub-delimiter (sub-delims = ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; =, permitted in path/query), the URL-detection pass has no syntactic reason to stop before the ** emphasis delimiters, so they get captured into the href. A markdown-aware renderer should resolve emphasis structure first and only linkify the inner text.

Suggested fix

Resolve markdown emphasis (**…**, *…*, _…_) before applying autolink detection, or trim trailing */_ emphasis-delimiter runs from autolink candidate boundaries.

Environment

Claude Code mobile app (where observed). May affect other markdown-render surfaces.

Related issues (not duplicates)

  • #59264 (closed) — same mobile surface; autolinker too aggressive at render time (autolinks bare hostnames in code blocks). Same subsystem, different trigger.
  • #53188 (open) — autolinker mis-judges URL boundaries (treats .md/.rs extensions as TLDs). Closest in spirit (wrong boundary detection), different trigger.
  • #56033 / #29188 — autolink-produces-404 via wrong-repo issue-ref resolution; unrelated mechanism, listed for completeness.

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