W3 Validator trouble with GET variables?

Here's the problem i'm having... in trying to validate my page against the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. I'm getting a load error with the ampresand in the URL of my anchor tags...

<a href="concert.php?id=22&name=Nine+Inch+Nails%3A+Fragility+V2.0+Tour">

The errors are:

• cannot generate system identifier for general entity "name"
• general entity "name" not defined and no default entity
• reference not terminated by REFC delimiter
• reference to external entity in attribute value

All the errors seem ot point to the ampresand... but the ampresand, or even "name", isn't a real part of my html... why should the validator care what's in an href attribute?

Is this an error within the validator, or is there something i'm doing wrong?

You cannot use ampersands in your HTML, as it is not valid... all non alpha chars must be encoded using the ISO standard. E.g. & = &
Another thing you should be doing is encoding all your URL's - this has been a standard since the birth of HTTP, but no-one does it..... me included

The ampersand isn't really a part of my HTML; the ampersand is a part of the name/value pairs...
When listing more than one variable in the query string, you seperate them with ampersands...
I am doing a urlencode() [PHP] on the variables passed within the querystring, which converts the ampersands into %26...
I assume that if i were to do this on the entire query string, it wouldn't get interpretted properly on the other page.

You only separate your name/value pairs with & and ? in the querystring of your browser - not your source... & should be %26 - I was wrong with the ISO - that's for your HTML text, not the HREF values.

Try it and see.

So a proper anchor tag should read:

<a href="concert.php?id=22%26name=Nine+Inch+Nails%3A+Fragility+V2.0+Tour">

And this would pass id and name accordingly?

*update*

I just tried (in the case of PHP) doing:


This causes the URL to look like:
http://localhost/concert.php?id%3D2...ility+V2.0+Tour

And the PHP $_GET array to print with a key of id=22&name=Nine_Inch_Nails:_Fragility_V2_0_Tour and no value...

UGH - Me again - please disregard my second post (posted @ 3:30am :p) - I was right the first time - your &'s should be written as & in URL's. Here's the quote from W3C, plus I just made a quick little experiment to check I'm not insane :PTo reiterate:
Ater the initial '?', name/value pairs should be separated by '&'
Actual name/value pair strings, should be encoded using the %XX format. This will then allow you to use unsafe strings in your querystrings - '&' encoded to it's %XX format equivelant, for example, will then be interpretted correctly as a string, and not an entity separator.

Well stumpy, as it turns out you were right...

To conclude, for others who've been following along, this is my resulting URL:
<a href="concert.php?id=22&name=Nine+Inch+Nails%3A+Fragility+V2.0+Tour">

& is something that satisfies both the validator and the functionality of my site...
It just seems kind of strange I guess...

One thing that confuses me, from your quote... "...will suffice to terminate the entity, but some browsers get this wrong; the safest thing to do is to terminate all entities with a semicolon..."

I guess this means not all browsers will handle that properly?
I hope its safe to assume that only the jurrassic browsers will stumble...

Again, thanks for your help and research Stumpy.

For the record - straight from the XHTML 1.0 spec (it's suprisingly easy to understand!):

Ohhh... I mis-interpreted it then...

In order to ensure that documents are compatible with historical HTML user agents...

So this in theory should work with all browsers then?

I completely understand it... I've used entities in XML documents before, so I understand the concepts behind it... Just can't see converting all my URL's to comply with the &

Hi,

Im having the same problem, I've tried substituting the ampersand for the ISO code, but still no joy.

My code now reads

<a href="index.cfm?linkID=261&toplevel=261" id="Choose COurse">Choose Your Course</a>

But I still get the error in the validator:

cannot generate system identifier for general entity "toplevel"


Please Help?!?!?

Thanks in advance

Post the URL to the page

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, sorted now, it was the space in the id that cause the error.

Thanks again

Ugh - can't believe I missed that too!! Zzzzzzzzzz