Showing ampersand in chrome context menu title

Question

I have been working on a small Chrome extension with a problem: I can't seem to get my head around and would appreciate someone to look at it with a fresh perspective.

The goal is to create a Chrome extension which enables you to select text on any given website and display an option to send the selection to another website for search using a contextmenu item.

My manifest.json (v2) looks like this:

{
   "name": "simple ext",
   "version": "0.0.1.0",
   "description": "this is a test",
   "background": {
        "scripts": ["js/test.js"]
   },
   "default_locale": "en",
   "manifest_version": 2
}

messages.json:

{
"contextMenuTitle": {
        "message": "Search for '$searchStr$'"
        "placeholders":{
            "searchStr": {
                "content": "$1"
            }
        }
}
}

And js/test.js:

chrome.contextMenus.create({
       "title": chrome.i18n.getMessage("contextMenuTitle", "%s"),
       "contexts": ["selection"],
       "onclick" : function(e){
               if(e.selectionText){
                var searchURL = getSearchURL(e.selectionText);
                chrome.tabs.create({"url": searchURL});
                }
            }});

The problem I have is when I select text like "science & technology" the context menu shows the text "Search for 'science technology'" but in the onclick event, I get the correct text (that is 'science & technology'). So my searches work properly. The problem is with the text being shown as the title in the context menu.

Answer 1

I had a look at this and you might want to report a bug at http://crbug.com/ if one doesn't exist allready (had a 'quick' look and couldn't find anything). This 'bug' seems to apply to both the localization and context menu title. Neither will display an ampersand if you only use one, to get one to show for either it seems you have to use two && and then it will show as & (in your bug report, mention that this isnt explained in the docs either). But as you cant change the contents of %s before its shown I don't know how your going to deal with that....Unless you didn't use the %s and updated the title yourself every time they selected something on the page.