Ampersands in hyperlink

Question

Hi there,
In our architecture, we have developed a perl script to authenticate user before allowing a report to be generated. Thus, all hyperlinks in a report X that would produce another report Y must point to the perl script, passing the name of the report Y as a parameter.
For maintenance purposes, I have a query that hold constants (like the URL root of the perl script, the name of the report Y, and so on). I've tried to build the hyperlink like this :
&<URLRoot>usr=&<P_USR>&rep=&<ReportName>
|
I think that the highlighted ampersand is doing problem since what is produced in HTMLCSS is something like this :
http://my.webserver.com/myPerlScript.pl?
usr=ADMIN&rep=&<ReportName>
&#0124; &#0124;&#0124; &#0124;&#0124; &#0124;&#0124; &#0124;&#0124; &#0124;&#0124; &#0124;| (not what I want)
Is there an escape character to tell O.R. "this is an ampersand, not the begining of a parameter"?
(As a workaround, I've defined another constant in my constants-query, Amp, whose value is '&' and I've replaced the 'real' ampersands in my query by &<Amp>. It's working but IMO it's pretty ugly ;-)
Thanks in advance!
Frederic

Answer 1

Here's the thing:
If submitting by form then req.getParameter(name) works fine for both types of parameter values.
If submitting by link then req.getParameter(name)
- Works for parameters with '=' in them
- Doesn't work for values with '&' in them.
I actually need to be able to parse a query string (the parameter list part of a link). However, it isn't specific to submission processing.
I want to be able to parse the string generically regardless of whether it comes from the web or whether I call it from within the code.
In short, I want to be able to take a string like Param1=Val&ue&Param2=Val=ue and split it into name/value pairs from anywhere in the code.