500 error returned when shortening website with title in Japanese

[ycy-0510]

Shlink version

stable

PHP version

4.4.14

How do you serve Shlink

Docker image

Database engine

PostgreSQL

Database version

lastest

Current behavior

When attempting to shorten the URL https://web.archive.org/web/20000511004038/http://www.nsc.gov.tw/, the API/UI responds with an Internal Server Error. Following this error, the "Recent Short URLs" list on the dashboard becomes unresponsive and fails to query, rendering the recent list view unusable.

Expected behavior

The system should correctly process and shorten valid URLs containing nested schemes (like Wayback Machine links). If this specific format cannot be supported, the application must validate and reject the input before attempting to write to the database. This would prevent the Internal Server Error and ensure the dashboard remains functional instead of breaking the "Recent Short URLs" query.

Minimum steps to reproduce

1. Attempt to create a short URL for the target: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511004038/http://www.nsc.gov.tw/

2. Observe that the request fails with an Internal Server Error.

3. Navigate to the Shlink Dashboard (or refresh the page).

4. Attempt to load the "Recent Short URLs" list.

5. Observe that the list fails to query and cannot be displayed.

[acelaya]

The problem is not the link, but the title on that page, which is making Shlink throw some kind of encoding error. You can see the error by checking Shlink logs: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: '\xC5w\xAA\xEF\xA5\xFA...' for column 'title'.

Shlink tries to resolve the link title from the <title /> tag if no title is explicitly provided, so for now, you can work around this by providing any title while creating the short URL, or by disabling title resolution in your Shlink instance via AUTO_RESOLVE_TITLES=false.

Other encoding issues with the title have been reported in the past (see #2129 or #2334, for example), and some actions have been taken, but I guess I haven't nailed it yet, so I'll take a look at this.

In the future, try not to make assumptions when reporting a bug, as it can be misleading. Just report what you see and the steps to reproduce it.