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Martin
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I will just add a few comments on various formats of the link to an answer:

  • As explained in other answer, you can get a link by clicking on share. Notice that if you do this while logged in the link contains your user id at the end - in my case I get: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/45598/183484. The link works as well without user id and if you do not want it there you can simply remove it and you still get a working link: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/45598 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/45598 (This is useful if you do not want the link to reveal your identity. If you do not care much about badges, there is not actually much difference between using the two links.)
  • By clicking on some link to answer you get link in address bar which has the following format: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45597/how-can-i-link-to-a-specific-answer/45598#45598 How can I link to a specific answer? The advantage of this is that it contains also question id and it is at least partially human readable. (In fact, you can replace the part how-can-i-link-to-a-specific-answer by pretty much anything, as long as you keep it a valid url.)
  • Quite often when I include a link in a post on Stack Exchange or in chat, I use [text](url) format. For example: [How can I link to a specific answer?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/45597#45598) How can I link to a specific answer? or [jp2code's answer](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45597/how-can-i-link-to-a-specific-answer/45598#45598) jp2code's answer, etc.1 I will add that I obtained the first link using the bookmarklet "Formatted link to a webpage" from this page (Internet Archive). Personally, I find it quite useful - by one click it creates a formatted link, where the title of the post is included. (Or if some part of the page is selected, it is included is text.)

In case of link rot, I will copy here also the source of the above bookmarklet:

t=window.getSelection().toString(); if (!t && document.querySelector('h1')) { t=document.querySelector('h1').textContent.replace(/ \[closed\]| \[on hold\]| \[duplicate\]/g,'').trim(); } else if (!t) { t=document.title.split('-')[0].trim(); } u=window.location.href; if (typeof StackExchange!=='undefined' && u.indexOf('area51')==-1 && /^[qa]/.test(u.split('/')[3])) { u=window.location.protocol+'//'+window.location.hostname+'/q/'+window.location.pathname.split('/')[2]+window.location.hash; } window.prompt('Copy to Clipboard','['+t+']('+u+')'); 

1Stack Exchange quite often expands bare link to the question title. But this is not always reliable. And in this way you have a better control over the text.

Martin
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