Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand ("&"):

<!-- This is invalid! --> <a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>

This example generates an error for "unknown entity section" because the "&" is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert &copy=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since ⟨ is the HTMLentity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert &lang=en to 〈=en. And one old browser even finds the entity §, converting &section=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of &when writing URLs in HTML:

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2&amp;copy=3&amp;lang=en">...</a>

Note that replacing & with &amp; is only done when writing the URLin HTML, where "&" is a special character (along with "<" and ">"). When writing the same URLin a plain text email message or in the location bar of your browser, you would use "&" and not "&amp;". With HTML, the browser translates "&amp;" to "&" so the Web server would only see "&" and not "&amp;" in the query string of the request.