[nhf]

So far, I've been able to reproduce a few transformations:

* www[0-9].example.tld -> [0-9].example.tld, e.g. www1.nyc.gov -> 1.nyc.gov

* example[ac|co|gov|edu].tld -> example.[ac|co|gov|edu].tld e.g. exampleac.uk -> example.ac.uk

My guess, as someone else further down the comments mentioned, is that some URL handling library is doing more than expected to its input. I filed an internal bug report referencing some of the public reports from a dev build of Android 12, so hopefully this will get triaged soon if someone hasn't already done a similar reproduction.

(I work at Google, but on nothing remotely related to Android.)

[xiphias2]

I was working on Linkdoctor at Google, it's part of the spelling team now, but a separate service (FixURLRequest).

[nneonneo]

Thanks for confirming the report. I'm curious - if you hand-wrote a URL on a piece of paper (or printed it out from a printer/displayed it on a different screen), and then scanned it with the camera, would the camera pick it up? Would the camera corrupt the URL?

[nhf]

Interesting question! However the OCR functionality in the camera (through Google Lens) runs a separate pipeline. Other bug reporters said Lens didn't have the issue when scanning QR codes so I doubt it would surface there.

[nikau]

Bing.com -> Google.com