HTML: href's that have "&" with missing "amp;"

2008-11-06 10:58  i1565     [permalink]

HTML is actually getting pretty old. It started from a parent technology (SGML) and is an inspiration for other standards since (XML!). A basic idea from the start was to parse it very forgivingly. Something system-builders would like to give up, since it makes parsing complexer. XML is strict by nature, and XHTML is HTML's strict incarnation, but for us keyboard-pounders, it's another thing to keep track of when we're scripting up pages and websites. A commonly forgotten thing when writing HTML that contains a link or image, is to write ampersand's in the URL as "&" when writing the href attribute. It's an easy thing to forget, and transitional HTML is still covering this up silently, but with XHTML this is a killer and will drop the rest of the document from that point.

Knowing that, enter DirFind to grep code for these instances! Regular Expressions to the rescue: with a bit of negative look-forward you can list where you've forgotten "amp;" in no-time:

(src|href)="[^"]+?&(?!amp;)

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