With great respect and appreciation for Randal... and not a little trepidation, let me quote two bits of tested perl code that each print '&' into an HTML page without making use of the '&amp' entity.

The first example prints the '&' as displayed, plain text.
The second example prints the '&' inside an HTML tag:

   print "Let's show a query string: ?key1=one&key2=two\n";
   print "<a href='$my_url?key1=one&key2=two'>Click here</a>\n";
[download]

The HTML '&amp' entity does have its use. A prime example of which is the fact that I had to type '&amp' to get the third word in the previous sentence to appear correctly!

Update: This is bad advice!! Read the next post for the correction. (This post left in place so that Randal's next post will make sense.)

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