URL encode sees “&” (ampersand) as “&” HTML entity

298
votes

I am encoding a string that will be passed in a URL (via GET). But if I use escape, encodeURI or encodeURIComponent, & will be replaced with %26amp%3B, but I want it to be replaced with %26. What am I doing wrong?

3
javascripturlencode
Where does the string come from? Can you post the code you have so far? – Andy E
& is the proper way to escape the ampersand in an HTML context...where is your source coming from? and what's the destination? It may be better to do this server-side for example. – Nick Craver♦
I grap something from the HTML body (and that is HTML encoded (so, there is & I realize now)) and I have to pass it in an URL... So, I need to decode the html (but how?) en then encode the string (with encodeURIComponent)... – dododedodonl
found it... I used in jquery .html(), not .text()... stupid (A) – dododedodonl
jQuery's .html() maps to the innerHTML property, so the issue is as I said in my answer :-) – Andy E

3 Answers

441
votes

Without seeing your code, it's hard to answer other than a stab in the dark. I would guess that the string you're passing to encodeURIComponent(), which is the correct method to use, is coming from the result of accessing the innerHTML property. The solution is to get the innerText/textContent property value instead:

var str, 
    el = document.getElementById("myUrl");

if ("textContent" in el)
    str = encodeURIComponent(el.textContent);
else
    str = encodeURIComponent(el.innerText);

If that isn't the case, you can use the replace() method to replace the HTML entity:

encodeURIComponent(str.replace(/&/g, "&"));
98
votes

If you did literally this:

encodeURIComponent('&')

Then the result is %26, you can test it here. Make sure the string you are encoding is just & and not & to begin with...otherwise it is encoding correctly, which is likely the case. If you need a different result for some reason, you can do a .replace(/&/g,'&') before the encoding.

4
votes

There is HTML and URI encodings. & is & encoded in HTML while %26 is & in URI encoding.

So before URI encoding your string you might want to HTML decode and then URI encode it :)

var div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = '&AndOtherHTMLEncodedStuff';
var htmlDecoded = div.firstChild.nodeValue;
var urlEncoded = encodeURIComponent(htmlDecoded);

result %26AndOtherHTMLEncodedStuff

Hope this saves you some time