Re: LYNX-DEV Hex escaping & and company

[Christopher R. Maden]

[Duncan Hill]
> After scrabbling around, I finally found how to turn & into %26 :)
> Interestingly enough, none of the search engines found any
> references to that in the archives.  Anyway, is there any reason for
> a server not to accept %26 in place of an &?  I can't type the & at
> the prompt, because that'll background the process, without
> finishing the search URL.

URL-escaping a character means that the character is not meaningful in
the URL's context - i.e., this ampersand is *not* a field separator,
but is data.  You are taking a field separator and turning it into
data - the search engines are obeying your explicit (if unintentional)
instructions.

The beast from whom you are trying to hide the ampersand is your UNIX
shell, and you should escape it in a manner that will hide it from
UNIX; try \&.

This is analogous to when & should be used in hrefs.  When it's a
field separator in a URL, you don't want to hide it from the Web
server, so you should not use %26, but you do want to hide it from the
SGML entity manager, so you should use &.

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden                  One Richmond Square
DynaText SIT Technical Support        Providence, RI 02906 USA
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