Mitch Fincher: The Distracted Programmer: ie firefox href javascript

Monday, January 14, 2008

Interesting difference between ie and firefox/opera regarding location.href

Recently here at inotech we ran into some oddities regarding javascript in different browsers. This test page shows the issue:


<body>
<h2>Test of ampersands </h2>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" ><!--
location.href="http://www.myhost.org/cgi-bin/SimpleFormAction.pl?cat=felix&amp;dog=fido";
//--></script>
</body>

Note the the "&" in the location.href value have been escaped already to "&".

In Internet Explorer the following is echoed back from the form:


cat = felix
dog = fido

But in Firefox and IE we get,


cat = felix
amp;dog = fido

IE converts the "&" to just "&", although I think Firefox/Opera are doing the right thing not to escape the amp. No charge for this tip today, but be careful in how you specify the ampersand in your hrefs.