URL encode sees “&” (ampersand) as “&” HTML entity

Question

I am encoding a string that will be passed in a URL (via GET). But if I use escape, encodeURI or encodeURIComponent, & will be replaced with %26amp%3B, but I want it to be replaced with %26. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Without seeing your code, it's hard to answer other than a stab in the dark. I would guess that the string you're passing to encodeURIComponent(), which is the correct method to use, is coming from the result of accessing the innerHTML property. The solution is to get the innerText/textContent property value instead:

var str, 
    el = document.getElementById("myUrl");

if ("textContent" in el)
    str = encodeURIComponent(el.textContent);
else
    str = encodeURIComponent(el.innerText);

If that isn't the case, you can use the replace() method to replace the HTML entity:

encodeURIComponent(str.replace(/&/g, "&"));