Why does & become &

Question

We have a TinyMCE Editor and we sent the images that can be inserted into the editor like this:

'test?foo=something&bar=something'

When I view the source in TinyMCE it becomes :

<img src="test?foo=something&amp;bar=something"/>

Why does & become &? What is the main idea behind that?

Which software does this conversion automatically because I can't see any explicit code . I am aware of HTML Entities .

Answer 1

There are some special characters which are reserved in HTML. These characters can not be used directly like other character.

For example, all the tags in HTML are enclosed in LESS THAN and GREATER THAN signs (ie '<' and '>'). So to display the '>' or '<' sign in HTML page, it converts the character to HTML code. These HTML codes are converted to ascii character by the browser.

& is the HTML code for '&'.

There are many other special characters. Some of them are listed in the link below.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp