- if e.message =~ /\(404 - Not Found\)/i
- # see if we failed to find the thing because of trailing punctuation
- # but check that we still have 'something' in the URL
+ debug e
+ # we might get a 404 because of trailing punctuation, so we try again
+ # with the last character stripped. this might generate invalid URIs
+ # (e.g. because "some.url" gets chopped to some.url%2, so catch that too
+ if e.message =~ /\(404 - Not Found\)/i or e.kind_of?(URI::InvalidURIError)
+ # chop off last character, and retry if we still have enough string to
+ # look like a minimal URL