Re: posting ampersand in xml

[Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sender: Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


> We run a RPG program that constructs an xml string from DB2/400 data. 
> This xml string is then passed to a program that executes the 
> http_url_post_raw function posting the string to a java servlet.  This 
> works fine unless the string contains an ampersand character.  For 
> example, the RPG program (using http_url_post_raw) passes this xml 
> string to the servlet correctly: "<data><id>1234</id><company>SMITH INC 
> </company></data>".  However if the string is equal to 
> "<data><id>3456</id><company>SMITH & WESSON</company></data>" then the 
> program only sends the first 34 characters to the servlet.

Are you using HTTPAPI's encoder routines, or are you just passing the 
string as-is to http_url_post_raw()?

If you're just passing the string directly to http_url_post_raw(), then 
HTTPAPI doesn't do any sort of encoding.  The data is translated to ASCII 
then copied byte-by-byte to the Web server.

It pays absolutely no attention to what the bytes contain.  Whatever you 
tell it to send, it'll send.

However, the ampersand character does have a special meaning, both in a 
URL encoded document and in an XML document.  So, it's possible that the 
Web server is trying to interpret the character as an XML entity, or a 
variable separator, or something like that.  This has nothing to do with 
HTTPAPI, though.  HTTPAPI assumes that you know what you're doing, and 
just sends whatever you ask it to send.

> If the xml string contains an ampersand sign then the string is 
> truncated at the ampersand sign.  This truncation causes a problem on 
> the web side because the XML string is incomplete.  Our first impression 
> is that the utility's http_url_post_raw is encoding the spaces in the 
> string correctly but not the ampersand sign.

http_url_post_raw does not encode the data AT ALL aside from translating 
it from EBCDIC to ASCII.  (and If you call http_url_post_raw2, it won't 
even do that!)

If you want the data to be encoded, you have to call an encoder routine 
FIRST, then pass the already encoded data to HTTP_url_post_raw().

HTTPAPI doesn't care what your data is, only where it's located in memory 
and how long it is.  It doesn't try to read or interpret it, it just 
copies it from memory to the network.


> We have seen some literature that says the ampersand needs to be 
> replaced with "&amp;" - we have tried that in the program that 
> constructs the xml string but that has not worked.

That might matter to an XML parser, but it won't matter to HTTPAPI or to 
the HTTP protocol.
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