Dear Fellow Monks,

I have this bunch of Perl-scripts which together make a nice dynamic website.

Now, for various reasons I must place in a web-page an href-link to another script. This other script expects to receive a number of parameters through the GET-protocol, which I therefore encode into the URL put into the href.

Say that the href turns out to be href='script.pl?company=IBM&place=Brussels'. This works nice and fine: script.pl happily obtains both parameters (thanks to CGI.pm of course) and outputs another dynamic webpage.

Now it comes to pass that the name of the company is "Smith & Jones" and the href becomes href='script.pl?company=Smith & Jones&place=Brussels'.

All of a sudden, script.pl sees only "Smith " in the company -parameter and a third parameter "Jones" pops into being.

Obviously the "&" between "Smith" and "Jones" was seen to be a delimiter, rather than part of the company-parameter.

Vainly I tried to find a way to escape this "&": All to no avail, CGI.pm seems to unescape all "&"-entities prior to parsing the URL for the GET-parameters.

I looked through the CGI-docs but could not find a solution.

Does anyone has a suggestion how to sneak in an "&" into a GET-parameter?

Although I do not think it has anything to do with this problem, I mention that my scripts do not directly output HTML, but XML which get server-side transformed into HTML by XSLT.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to CGI : How to put an "&" into a GET-parameter by CountZero

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