RetroAchievements / RetroAchievements/RAIntegration
Linking does not work for games that contain certain characters
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- C++
- Stars
- 124
- Forks
- 34
- Avg merge
- 5d 18h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 13
Description
The linking window cannot reproduce some characters in game titles, as in the rest of the application (as expected). What is unexpected is that when trying to link, a second entry is created with a different title, based on the incorrectly-decoded name of the first one.

This example is what happens following an attempt at linking. The first entry is the entry that was created upon attempting to link with the second one. The character that should be decoded as an apostrophe (’) is in fact decoded (or at least encoded on the website) as â.
Similarly, / in an existing game title gets converted to -, and a new entry is created based on that substitution.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reproducing the linking flow described in the issue with a game title containing a curly apostrophe and another containing /, then trace the linking window's title handling and the request sent to RetroAchievements.org. Done means linking reuses the existing game, preserves the title characters, and does not create a second entry from a mis-decoded or substituted name.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- api, desktop
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100