Last modified: 2013-01-16 15:30:26 UTC
This bug may already be resolved in SMW 1.9, but I bumped into it on an installation of MW 1.19.2 with SMW 1.8 (PHP 5.3.3-7 and MySQL 5.1.66) following an upgrade from SMW 1.7.2. In my case, it is affecting 50+ pages. As is probably documented somewhere on the website, square brackets are not supported in semantic annotations (except if #set is used), but this can be easily circumvented by using HTML equivalents instead. So far so good. However, when annotation relies on values queried from other pages, and those values contain square brackets in HTML ([ and ]), something goes amiss. Schematically, [[Property::blabla {{#ask: [[Pagesuchandsuch]] |?...|link=none}} blabla]] is shown as [[Property::blabla <retrieved values containing [...]> blabla]] and the value wanted for this property does not get declared. This did not present any problems in versions of SMW prior to SMW 1.8. I failed to replicate this bug on two sandbox sites: SMW 1.8 alpha: http://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Cav_1 SMW 1.9 alpha: http://scratchpad.referata.com/wiki/User:Cav/test_2 It could mean that the bug has been fixed, or perhaps that localsettings has been configured to allow links (and square brackets) in values.
To add to the above. It looks as if the HTML-encoded brackets are interpreted as actual brackets when the values that contain them are queried.