Ampersands (&) in xlink:href attributes of SVG images?

Question

I'm building an SVG document which contains various image tags. The xlink:href (source URL) attributes for the images contain query strings with ampersands. If I escape them as %26 or the ascii encoding ? they're not valid query strings and the server won't deliver the image. I can't escape them with CDATA because they're attributes (not nodes). I've tried creating an xlink:href node within the image tag but that get's ignored by the SVG parser. I want to use pure SVG (not SVG within HTML) so that I can convert to a JPG later, thus scripting is out...

Any hints on how I can make the below work?

<image x="0" y="0" width="306" height="306" xlink:href="http://host.com/image.jpg?token=asdf&expiration=9384029&etc=etc"/>

Thanks!

Answer 1

In all XML applications, including SVG, the following entities are valid without a custom DTD:

• & - &
• > - >
• < - <

In your case, this should work without resorting to ugly ASCII hacks:

<image xlink:href="http://foo.com/bar.jpg?token=asdf&amp;exp=9384&amp;etc=etc"/>