IE problems with URL

[owltech]

A few days ago I wracked my brain over an IE7 (only) problem that I thought everyone might like to know about. I was building and sending a URL that looked roughly like this:

www.somesite.com/program.php?param1=123&param2=234&copy_code=5

The program.php never received the third prarameter, because IE7 apparently tokenized the &copy into the copyright symbol ©. The HTML token for that symbol is [©]. Notice that in the URL above, there is no ending semicolon, however IE still managed to render the received URL as:

www.somesite.com/program.php?param1=123&param2=234©_code=5

which of course bombed the program. No other browser messed up the URL like that. Is this a bug in IE or feature? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

I would think that it's just that IE7 has different compatability, so that it may interpret &copy as © while most browsers require the semicolon. Require is the key word here; it's no glitch. I would say it's not a bug or a feature, just an annoyance. So what I would do if I were you is just change the "copy" in your code to "cpy" or something else.

[owltech]

Well, that's what I did (change the parameter name). But it sure took me a long time to find the "annoyance". Now, however, I have to make sure that in the future I don't pick a parameter name that could also be tokenized. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

[Grindlay]

Have just discovered this exact same problem with a client's site which was built and tested on FF4 and Chrome. In IE7-9, the URL :

page.php?id=1&copy_to_archive=1

as you say, IE sticks a copyright symbol in the URL.
I would say this is a bug as there is no semicolon following the &copy.
I have advised the client to use a "proper" browser.

More info here, many agreeing this is an IE bug :

http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200812/accidental_html_entities_in_urls.html

[owltech]

Thanks for everyone's response to this. -- owltech