Re: ampersands in href's

[Jochem Maas <jochem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marek Kilimajer wrote:
> Jack Jackson wrote:
>
> > Murray @ PlanetThoughtful wrote:
> >
> > > > If I want to make a link to a URL which includes some GETs can I 
> > > > just do:
> > > >
> > > > <a href='{$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']}?p={$p}&c={$s}' ... etc etc
> > > >
> > > > or must I escape the ampersand somehow?

...

> >
>
> You should use &amp; for all document types, not only xhtml

AFAICR the specification[s] go[es] further than that. all relevant
chars should be converted to their htmlentity equivelant if that
char appears inside the attribute of an *ML element. i.e.
you should really be escaping, for instance, title and alt
atrtibute values (e.g. for IMG or A tags).

I don't know which chars exactly make up the relevant set but
htmlentities() and its friends have a good idea :-)
e.g.: http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-html-translation-table.php

anyway, its best to get this kind of thing working first then
fix any validation errors. also I personally just use '&' as the
seperator in my code and if it doesn't break anything i use
an output filter to change all '&' inside urls (inside href, src attribs etc)
to '&amp;' - I find using '&amp;' (or allowing both '&amp;' and '&')
inside my code makes it alot harder to do URL manipulation/augmentation).

also take a lot at the http_build_query() function (php5 only) which
I find very useful in creating complex query strings.

lastly here is a little function thats capable of replacing all
occurances of '&' with '&amp;' without buggering up already occuring
instances of '&amp;' ...

function properAmpersands($url)
{
    return preg_replace("/(&)(?!amp;)/","&amp;",(string)$url);
}

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