ampersand character in URIs

I encounter an annoying number of ampersands in URIs I copy and paste
into blog style diary entries, written in HTML with a text editor. Does
anyone happen to know of reasonably reliable method of detecting and
fixing these? At present I mostly don't notice ampersands until I get
around to validating my pages. I don't validate nearly as often as I add
invalid URIs.

At the moment I have no idea of how to automate a fix. Google didn't
turn up anything so far. One possibility might be a Bookmarklet. Another
a script done as a droplet, that accepts something from the buffer,
changes it, and puts it back into the paste buffer.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

On 12/30/2007 5:37 PM, Stefan Ram wrote:

"David E. Ross" <nobody (AT) nowhere (DOT) not> writes:
I'm not sure, but I think this repair script will turn a good
&amp;
into
&amp;amp;

RFC 2396 does not distinguish between »good &amp;s« and others.

So, when do you deem an »&amp;« to be »good«?

I consider the entity reference "&amp;" to be good if it appears where
it is intended to represent the symbol "&" in a Web context that does
not allow the symbol "&" to represent itself.

Don't quibble about semantics. The questions are:

If the entity reference "&amp;" is already in an HTML file along with
plain "&" symbols, what will the repair() subroutine do with it?

Will "&amp;" become "&amp;amp;" or not?

--
David Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

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