The reference to the object "foo" must end with the symbol ';' limiter

Question

I have HTML code generated using Google Checkout that works fine on an HTML page. When I put the same code on an XHTML page, it throws the following exception:

entity reference "w" must end with the character ';' Separator

It refers to the request parameter w in the URL below the src attribute:

 <input type="image" name="Google Checkout" alt="Fast checkout through Google" src="http://sandbox.google.com/checkout/buttons/checkout.gif?merchant_id=211512493599623&w=180&h=46&style=white&variant=text&loc=en_US" height="46" width="180" /> 

How is this caused and how can I solve it?

Answer 1

Ampersand & is a special character in HTML and XML. If you want to use it as a regular character, you need to encode it correctly. Write & instead of & :

 src="...9623&w=180&h=46&style=white&variant=text&loc=en_US" 

& denotes the beginning of an encoded object, for example < for < , or & for & . In your case, the parser tries to interpret &w as an entity. But objects always end with ; therefore, if absent ; , you get an error message.