I'm having some trouble with some character encoding causing some problems with a search form on my website. One of the possible field values has an ampersand in it. When this is selected and a search is submitted the ampersand is encoded to: %2526
Upon using the pagination links at the bottom of the page and navigating to the second page in the list of results the ampersand is encoded to: %26
Finally...in an attempt to navigate to the 3rd page in the list the ampersand is changed back to: & This breaks the form as it assumes there's a variable that isn't actually there.
Why is the encoding changing? How can I fix this? Thanks for your help!
Answer
It looks like the field is being encoded twice. First pass will result in & changed into %26, then urlencoding %26 will result in %2526, since the encoding for % itself is %25.