Hi Steve

You raise a good point and, embarrassingly, the NHM's old UKSI website used to crash whenever someone requested a name with any kind of URL-meaningful character in it ... and it's classic bad programming.

As Charlie says, software that creates XML or HTML should convert meaningful characters in any strings to HTML entities with a function like htmlentities() (PHP) and likewise if they create a URL they needs to run it through a function like urlencode() (PHP) to encode meaningful characters and then urldecode() the strings afterwards when they come to use them.

I really wouldn't like to vet all of our strings for potential problems with HTML/XML or URLs otherwise we'd be constantly changing them as we found other software that didn't handle strings correctly ;)

Best wishes,
Chris R.

Hi Steve

No problem - if you get your strings encoded correctly then it will future-proof them against any meaningful character so it's definitely the way to go. Out of interest which software is creating the KML files (Google Earth?) and how are you getting the ampersanded strings into it?

Cheers
Chris R.