[WEB4LIB] Re: Ampersands in database URLs problem

[Thomas Dowling]

Drew, Bill wrote:

> 
>There are many cases where the ampersand must be in the URL.  I would ignore
>that part of the validation if the & is actually part of the URL.
>There is no way around it.
>
>  
>
The problem is that in different contexts, a different string of 
characters defines "an ampersand".  Is it "&", "&", "%26", or 
"=26"?  There are many characters that can or must be encoded 
differently in SGML/HTML/XML, in URLs, in quoted-printable mail, in 
plain text (which itself can be defined in various ways), etc.  What you 
really can't get around is the need to convert strings of text from one 
encoding to another as they pass through different contexts.

Without knowing the possible ambiguities you're creating, you can no 
more just ignore unescaped ampersands in HTML hyperlinks than, say, 
unescaped spaces or quotation marks.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu