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Asked: 2026-06-18T23:43:21+00:00

I keep hearing that W3C recommends to use ; instead of & as a

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I keep hearing that W3C recommends to use “;” instead of “&” as a query string separator.

We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI
implementors support the use of “;” in place of “&” to save authors
the trouble of escaping “&” characters in this manner.

Can somebody please explain why “;” is recommended instead of “&”?

Also, i tried using ";" instead of "&". (example: .com?str1=val1;str2=val2 ) . When reading as Request.QueryString["str1"] i get “val1;str2=val2“. So if ";" is recommended, how do we read the query strings?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As the linked document says, ; is recommended over & because

    the use of the “&” character to separate form fields interacts with its use in SGML attribute values to delimit character entity references.

    For example, say you want your URL to be ...?q1=v1&q2=v2

    There’s nothing wrong with & there. But if you want to put that query into an HTML attribute, <a href="...?q1=v1&q2=v2">, it breaks because, inside an HTML attribute, & represents the start of a character entity. You have to escape the & as &amp;, giving <a href="...?q1=v1&amp;q2=v2">, and it’d be easier if you didn’t have to.

    ; isn’t overloaded like this at all; you can put one in an HTML attribute and not worry about it. Thus it’d be much simpler if servers recognised ; as a query parameter separator.

    However, by the look of things (based on your experiment), ASP.Net doesn’t recognise it as such. How to get it to? I’m not sure you can.

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