Textarea - ampersand problem

[James Hodgkiss]

My jsp form contains a textarea that submits to a servlet. When the textarea content includes an ampersand (&), the servlet is treating what comes after the & as a separate parameter.

How can I overcome this?

Thanks,
James

[Bear Bibeault]

There's something you're not telling us.

Are you, for example, using Ajax? Because a "normal" form submission will handle this with no problems.

[James Hodgkiss]

Hiya Bear,

I hadn't realised, but the servlet template I had used obtained the parameters by doing...

BufferedReader paramsReader = request.getReader();
String paramsString = paramsReader.readLine();
String myParamValue = extractParamValueFromParamString("myParamName", paramsString);

The reason I'm using this technique is to overcome problems experienced with chunked encoding as the form data is very large and I have experienced problems obtaining parameter values before with such cases using the conventional request.getParameter() technique.

Temp solution to convert all "&"s in the request parameter values to "%26" works, but is there a better way??

Thanks,
James