How can I include an ampersand (&) in the SendGrid code editor?

Question

I'm adding a custom link to a SendGrid template.

Part of the link is some url query parameters. They're separated by an ampersand (&), like so:

<a href="www.example.com?arg1=foo&arg2=bar">My Link</a>

Sendgrid keeps auto-updating the string above, escaping the character and creating this:

<a href="www.example.com?arg1=foo&amp;arg2=bar">My Link</a>

This is not the same link at all, and I would like it to not force character escaping in my custom html code.

And no, these two links are not the same

const t1 = new URLSearchParams("a=1&b=2");
console.log(t1.get("a")); // 1
console.log(t1.get("b")); // null
console.log(t1.get("amp;b")); // 2

const t2 = new URLSearchParams("a=1&b=2");
console.log(t2.get("a")); // 1
console.log(t2.get("b")); // 2

How can I make SendGrid allow me to use a ampersand?

Answer 1

This is normal and does not change the meaning of the URL, as it will be automatically decoded back to & when the HTML document is parsed.

Generally, in HTML and XHTML, a lone ampersand must be written as a 'character entity reference' in order to avoid possible confusion with actual HTML entity references (such as "<" or """). All parsers recognize the named reference & although variants such as & are also legal.

HTML 4:

Authors should use "&" (ASCII decimal 38) instead of "&" to avoid confusion with the beginning of a character reference (entity reference open delimiter). Authors should also use "&" in attribute values since character references are allowed within CDATA attribute values.

HTML 5:

Attribute values are a mixture of text and character references, except with the additional restriction that the text cannot contain an ambiguous ampersand. [...]

8.2.4.72. Character reference state

If no match can be made and the temporary buffer consists of a U+0026 AMPERSAND character (&) followed by a sequence of one or more alphanumeric ASCII characters and a U+003B SEMICOLON character (;), then this is a parse error. [...] If the last character matched is not a U+003B SEMICOLON character (;), this is a parse error.

XHTML 1:

In order to ensure that documents are compatible with historical HTML user agents and XML-based user agents, ampersands used in a document that are to be treated as literal characters must be expressed themselves as an entity reference (e.g. "&"). For example, when the href attribute of the a element refers to a CGI script that takes parameters, it must be expressed as http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&name=user rather than as http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&name=user.