CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httpurlquery-string
empire29
empire29

Reputation: 3890

Is using & as a Query Parameter delimiter valid?

If I have a URL with query parameters, is it valid to "escape" the & query parameter delimiter?

Ex.

<a href="/foo.html?cat=meow&dog=woof">go</a>

vs

<a href="/foo.html?cat=meow&amp;dog=woof">go</a>

RFC 2396 clearly states that use of "&" is proper, but i cant find anything on the (in)validity of using escaped versions of the reserved characters.

One thing i noticed is Chrome seems to forgive them when clicking on the link in the browser, however when i view source of the page, and click on the link (/foo.html?cat=meow&dog=woof) from the view-source view, it doesn't work.

I'd love to know if there is any spec/section i can point to that says "only use & and dont use & or %26 (which is & URL encoded).

(Note: this question arises as I started working w a code base that structures their URLs in this fashion, I would personally use '&')

RCF 2396: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

UPDATE 1

Correct - the actual URL that the server writes to the page is: < a href="/foo.html?cat=meow&dog=woof" >go< /a > .. is there a spec that speaks to the validity of using & as a query param delimiter? Im not looking for "what works mostly" in browsers, but what is the correct way(s) to delimit query params.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4263

Answers (2)

Graham P Heath
Graham P Heath

Reputation: 7389

TLDR; All formulations that evaluate to & are equally valid.

From OP's link:

Unlike many specifications that use a BNF-like grammar to define the bytes (octets) allowed by a protocol, the URI grammar is defined in terms of characters. Each literal in the grammar corresponds to the character it represents, rather than to the octet encoding of that character in any particular coded character set. How a URI is represented in terms of bits and bytes on the wire is dependent upon the character encoding of the protocol used to transport it, or the charset of the document which contains it.

-- RFC: 2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax August 1998

by

T. Berners-Lee*

MIT/LCS

R. Fielding

U.C. Irvine

L. Masinter

Xerox Corporation

*: how cool is that!

Upvotes: 3

Oded
Oded

Reputation: 498942

The escaping is happening in HTML - when you click on such a link, the browser will treat &amp; as &.

To encode & on the URL you can percent encode it to %26.

Upvotes: 1

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