Replace any & in a link with %26

[cannedcherries]

Hello,

I will try to be as descriptive and clear as possible; IT and web development isn't my background, but fate has made me the main web developer I have been searching this forum and Googling for quite some time on this.

Problem: I need to change any instance of an ampersand (&) to %26 in a specific URL.

Complications: The URL that needs to have all & changed to %26 is being made from the referring URL using document.referrer. Our school uses a product called "EZProxy" to authenticate users into other websites, but it only works if the & in a link is a %26. Also, not all URL's can have this change on the page and still work, only this specific one. I'm also a beginner and admittedly don't really know what I'm doing.

What I'm using right now:

<script>                     
    document.write('<a href="http://test.ezproxy.edu/login?url=' + document.referrer + '" target="_blank">Click Here</a>');
</script>

This brings up the URL from the referring page pretty well and adds the proper prefix I need (the test.exproxy.edu" part), but it also needs to change any instance of & to %26 and I just don't know how to do it. I figured out how to change a & to a %26 if it's plain text, but I can't crack how to get it to do it with the URL provided by document.referrer. Is that even possible?

Thanks for any suggestions and pointers, any help appreciated.

[007Julien]

See this page about encodeURIComponent

alert(encodeURIComponent('&jules')); //=> %26jules

But there is not certain you have to encode this ampersand & !

See too this page which explains the different uses of encodeURI and encodeURIComponent

[cannedcherries]

Thanks for the links and example! I appreciate the help for a beginner - with the links, example, and some tinkering, I came up with a solution that worked for me. The encodeURIComponent option worked best for it. For the curious, it's below:

document.write('<a href="https://EZPROXY.prefix.example.edu/open?url=' + encodeURIComponent(document.referrer) + '" target="_blank">TEXT OF LINK</a>');