Markdown file links with spaces in absolute paths render as plain text

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Mar 13, 2026 by AaronPorterOS Closed Jun 23, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.311.21342 (993)

What subscription do you have?

Enterprise

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm

What issue are you seeing?

Markdown file links rendered in responses show as plain text instead of clickable links when the absolute path contains unencoded spaces.

Failed example:

[example.ts](/Volumes/Windows 11/My App/src/example.ts)

Actual: the raw Markdown string is shown in the response
Expected: a clickable file link

If the spaces are percent-encoded, it works:

[example.ts](/Volumes/Windows%2011/My%20App/src/example.ts)

Here's an example from the app:

<img width="777" height="380" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/27ffa815-bc49-4748-9440-11f5ddd06b1d" />

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. Create a folder whose absolute path contains spaces
  2. Create a file inside that folder
  3. In a Codex conversation, ask Codex to reference that file as a clickable file link in its response
  4. Observe that the response shows the raw Markdown text instead of a clickable link when the path contains unencoded spaces

What is the expected behavior?

Markdown file links rendered in responses should become clickable links even when the absolute path contains spaces, or the renderer/output pipeline should automatically handle/encode spaces in the link target

For example, a file at /Volumes/Windows 11/My App/src/example.ts should render as a clickable link

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 5 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

  • #13856
  • #14265

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phillza · 5 months ago

Confirmed on Windows in the Codex desktop app as well.

Environment:

  • App version: 26.311.2262.0
  • Platform: Windows 11

What I see:

  • Assistant replies sometimes show the raw Markdown file link instead of a rendered clickable file reference
  • The visible output looks like [filename](C:\Users\...\folder with spaces\file.csv) inside the message body
  • Clicking is impossible because the Markdown never renders into a link in the first place

This seems to happen when the absolute local path contains spaces. In my case the file paths are typical Windows paths under directories like C:\Users\phillip\Coding projects\...

So this does not appear to be macOS-only or Unix-path-only. It also affects Windows drive-letter paths when spaces are present in the link target.

Related symptom: when file references do render as blue text in other replies, Windows local-file opening is already affected by #14079. This issue is slightly earlier in the pipeline because the Markdown link is shown literally instead of rendering at all.