Searching a selected word at Dictionary.com from inside Scrivener has started returning a page not found error if the selection includes a trailing space. I’m pretty sure this is a new behavior, as I look up words from inside Scrivener pretty often (even though I’m not a fan of dictionary.com) and I wouldn’t normally trim off the trailing space before doing a search. The address bar shows a “%20” appended to the search query.
Is it just me?
Hello.
I just tried it. Selecting a word by double-clicking it didn’t introduce any %20.
I then purposely selected a superfluous space at the end of that same word (why would anyone select a single word this way?), and then it didn’t work.
Thanks, Vincent for checking. Interesting.
I had been selecting the word via Ctrl+Shift+click, which always grabs the trailing space. But I’m sure I’ve done that many times before without problems. Hmm….
Does it seem off to you?
That was the very first time I “used” Dictionary.com ever. I can’t tell.
Perhaps there used to be an internal routine to strip the useless space and it got lost. It would make sense.
At least you know now that it works fine with a double-click for selection.
You may also delete the %20 from the browser and then hit enter, whenever you forget / select the problematic space along the word.
Exact same behavior including the %20, never noticed before but don’t normally look up words with dictionary. But the same behavior occurs with the other writing tools, but with google goes thru but adds %20, however with thesaurus gives same error as dictionary and works if delete %20 and hit enter.
Arguably, this is a Dictionary.com error. %20 (encoded space character) at the end of a URL really should be ignored.
no this occurs with other of the web based writing tools as mentioned above.
The fact that more than one website doesn’t ignore errant spaces in a query doesn’t mean anything other than more than one website should be ignoring errant spaces. 
Here is a test search to DuckDuckGo with an encoded space on the end. You’ll note it does reformat the space to a + on load, but the space itself doesn’t end up in the front end query box. That’s a site that handles it correctly. If I accidentally include a space in my selection when I right-click on some text in this post and choose the “Search in DuckDuckGo for ‘accidentally include a space '” command, my browser does send the space, and DuckDuckGo rightly ignores it.
We could strip whitespaces around the selection, and that probably would be safe, but we have (as with my browser) opted more for letting you choose what you send to the website, even if what you send is something the website doesn’t understand.
So, Scrivener is more Boeing than Airbus. Cool.
I’d like to think we have fewer casualties on our hands, but all right. 
Day job: web engineer. I’d always strip URLs, both in the hyperlink, and in the parsing of the URL itself…
But who knows. Weirdness be weird.
Our previous serial number activation toolkit was bad about this, and our support was constantly flooded with “my serial number is bad” tickets because of how easy it is to accidentally include a space when copying and pasting serial numbers from emails.