ampersands in URLs

Thank you DrByte, I followed your instruction and make this fix:

<a href="<?php echo zen_href_link(isset($_GET['main_page']) ? $_GET['main_page']: 'index', zen_get_all_get_params(array('main_nav')));?>&main_nav=1">

zen_href_link now should take of the &
That reduces the errors from 25 down to 7, I'll check the rest to see how to fix them.

I noticed something weird:

1. zenid is automatically appended to The link to my "shine" livehelp link:

?department=2&pingtimes=15&zenid=dcd0b589f91ed7

This link is in includes/templates/mytemplate/sidebox/tpl_shine.php

$content = '<div style="margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="/livesupport/livehelp.php?department=2&pingtimes=15" target="_blank" ><img src="/livesupport/image.php?department=2&what=getstate" border="0" alt="live support" /></a>
              </div>';

How can I prevent Zen from doing this?

2. When the product's name contain &, it is not encoded as expected

There's a $add_session_id parameter to the zen_href_link() function which allows you to bypass the setting of a zenid for external links if you set it to false when sending your parameters to zen_href_link.

The rest of your questions appear to be related to general validation issues, and not to ampersands in URLs, which this thread is about.

Ya know, just because you expect the ZC code to change the & in your product names to & doesn't mean that's the way it is designed to work...
You need to edit your product names yourself, in the product name entry field. I did it, and it reads correctly as & in all displays, and validates.

Right as Kim , Dr byte have said all my ampersands was code I changed.

And probably still is !, can you help me fix the final few im down to 5 from 230 !

the site is my tapes-direct one the validation link if easier : http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tapes-direct.co.uk

one of the lines it is complaing about is one I added to tpl_categories to add my own link in.

	//mark added this for Td News link START
	$content .= '<div class="betterCategories"><a class="category-links" href="index.php?main_page=page&id=4&chapter=0;">';
	 $content .= zen_image(DIR_WS_TEMPLATE_IMAGES . 'bc_cat_boxes.gif') . $spacer;
        $content .= 'Tapes-Direct News</a></div>';
	//mark added this END

Something is adding a & after the chapter=0 without escaping it correctly

Thanks for help !

crazycucumber:

$content .= '<div class="betterCategories"><a class="category-links" href="index.php?main_page=page&id=4&chapter=0;">';

Change that line to this:

$content .= '<div class="betterCategories"><a class="category-links" href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_EZPAGES, 'id=4&chapter=0') . '">';

Thankyou , I knew my code was cumbersome ... I love the Zen way of doing it ! Just need to learn how !

Thanks again

I have a similar problem when I am trying to create an RSS feed for my site.

In my feed.xml, I have:
<item>

When the feed is added to iGoogle, I click on the link, the URL will become:
http://techawave.jitbid.com/techawave/index.php?main_page=index=8

"&cPath" is completely left off. I also tried to change the ampersand to "&" but it didnt help.

This also happens when I added the RSS feed to MyYahoo, so I dont believe this is Google or Yahoo's problem.

How do I fix this?

Thanks