[Fixed] Ampersand (&) in Category name shows All

[Biomech]

I have a small problem with my site. I am using the Paul01 template (although I do not believe this to be significant). And method 1 of category access(?) - passing the category as a GET variable.

When trying to access categories that contain an ampersand (&), ie: Health & Fitness, all news items are displayed. If no ampersand is contained within the category name, only the posts from the requested category appear.

The ampersand in the URL is clearly being interpreted as the mark for a second variable (as it should). The result of which being that a non existent category is being searched for.

http://www.domain.com/index.php?category=Food&Drink

Category "Food" is searched for. No results are displaying all posts.

I imagine this could be fixed by converting any ampersands into another character or removing them completely, like whitespace, from the database and subsequent queries.


Any thoughts / ideas / quick fix / patches?

[kbeeveer46]

Have a link to your site? As far as I am aware, the category links use the category safe name which gets rid of all the special characters.

[Biomech]

Beev, you must be a machine :P

Its a dev version at the moment located here: www.ongoss.com

The same situation seems to occur in Post Title's also:

http://www.ongoss.com/story.php?titl...ons-on-Website

Although this results in a blank page (as I imagine post "Advice-" is not being found).


Im running Pligg Beta 9.1 on apache.

[Luca]

Hi Biomech,
I do not have the complete solution however I have a concept of what is happening. I have had the same problem.

Lets say you have the following two categories:
Apple and Banana
Orange & Cherry

When index or upcoming is called, it is passed the category 'safe name'. Which would be the following strings in our case.
AppleandBanana
Orange&Cherry

The page then attempts to pick up the category passed to is with the follwing code $_REQUEST['category']

This code does not work properly for some charaters. Thus the output of this for our categories is
AppleandBanana
Orange
(the '&Cherry' as has not been dropped, ie after a different character the rest of the string is dropped.)

Thus if you wanted category 'Orange & Cherry' the page does not recognise your it, thus assumes you want 'all', which it does by default.

We need someone, with better php knowledge than myself, to explain why $_REQUEST['category'] drops certain category information when other characters are used.

Sorry I could not give you the answer however that maybe this gets us a step closer. Your interim solution is not to use the '&' or other characters.

Cheers,
L.

[kbeeveer46]

I think Ash fixed this last week http://pligg.svn.sourceforge.net/vie...v&revision=813

[Biomech]

Sweet, I'll check it out and see what happens