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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T07:32:38+00:00

Put this in your location bar in IE javascript:location.href=’http://www.google.com/search?q=something&lt=bar’ Watch in horror as it

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Put this in your location bar in IE

javascript:location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=something&lt=bar'

Watch in horror as it helpfully thinks &lt actually means &lt; and makes it a <.

WTF is going on here?

Other browsers don’t do this.
How do I prevent IE from doing this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since this is part of an HTML document you should escape the & by replacing it by &amp;

    An ampersand ‘&’ in HTML mark the start of a character reference entity such as &lt; &gt; and &eacute;

    Literal ampersands in your document should be written as &amp;

    Note that if that code is generated dynamical you should also escape the URL so that it can appear in a JavaScript string as well.

    Edited: I can confirm this particular problem occurs when pasting JavaScript code directly in the address bar. It seems HTML character escaping rules are irrelevant here after all.

    I’ve googled a bit and found this blog post which identify that particular behavior as an ie bug.

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