Transactional journey href url is not working with CloudPagesURL

Question

Hello I am having problems to understand why this might not work in HTML based (not built from blocks) transactional journey email triggered via API.

All variables are pulling through

<a href="%%=RedirectTo(CLoudPagesURL("1",'r',@r))=%%">click please</a>

I get

https://example.com/utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=xxxxx&utm_term=%%%3dv(%40url)%3d%%&utm_id=xxxx&sfmc_id=xxxxx

Do not get why the url from href gets into utm_term as paramter and is not even personalized. it stays as variable

Answer 1

This is rather weird but the following worked for me

%%[
SET @url = CloudPagesURL(1,'a', @a,'b', @b)
]%%

<a href="%%=RedirectTo(@url)=%%">Have fun with SFMC</a>