Ampersands in links and EZpages xHTML validation

[jwitt98]

Hi All,
Here's what's happening:
I am using an EZpage for my faq page. There are many links on this page that have to use the ampersand "&" within the link.
I can go through my EZpage and properly escape all the ampersands like so "&"
Once I do that, I can validate the page, no problem.

However, here is where the trouble starts:
The next time I go to edit something on the EZpage, all the ampersands are unescaped again. Unless I go through and fix them all again, the page will not validate.

It's apparent that the "amp;" is being properly stored, so I'm assuming that the "amp;" must be stripped when the data is retrieved from the database.

The problem is, I don't know where to start looking. could someone point me to the right place?

Here is a link to my faq page:
http://thetoolspot.us/index.php?main_page=page&id=4
If you scroll to the footer, you can find a link to the W3C validator.

Thanks

[jwitt98]

It was becoming increasingly frustrating to have to recode all those ampersands every time I wanted to edit something on the FAQ page. So, after enough digging I finally found the source. Although after looking at the code, I'm still not sure why it was stripping the entities from the ampersands. In any case here is how I solved the problem in case anyone else is as retentive as I am and want their EZpages to validate:

In admin/ezpages.php line 440
I changed:

echo zen_draw_textarea_field('pages_html_text', 'soft', '100%', '40', $ezInfo->pages_html_text); 

to:

echo zen_draw_textarea_field('pages_html_text', 'soft', '100%', '40', htmlspecialchars($ezInfo->pages_html_text)); 

It seems to work fine now.

[Website Rob]

Nice bit of troubleshooting and thanks for sharing.

I'm sure those of us where Validation is important will find it very handy to apply your elegant solution.

[jwitt98]

Thanks, just trying to save someone else the trouble.

[karl19]

Thanks for posting this, helped me figure out how to keep my entities for the ezPages titles. In admin/ezpages.php on line #383, I changed:

$ezInfo->pages_title,

to:

htmlspecialchars($ezInfo->pages_title),

Maybe that helps someone with a similar issue.