Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

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Posted on by CU-13072004-0

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a project in AL where I need to build a URL with query parameters. Everything works fine when I use other characters as the parameter separator (like #), but when I use the ampersand (&), it doesn't show up in the final URL string. Here’s the relevant portion of my code:

procedure GetUriWithQueryParams(BaseUri: Text; QueryParams: Dictionary of [Text, Text]) FullUri: Text
    var
        DictionaryKey: Text;
        ParamsSeparator: Char;
    begin
        ParamsSeparator := '&';
        FullUri := '';
        FullUri := FullUri + BaseUri + '?';

        foreach DictionaryKey in QueryParams.Keys() do
            FullUri := FullUri + DictionaryKey + '=' + QueryParams.Get(DictionaryKey) + ParamsSeparator;

        FullUri := FullUri.Substring(1, StrLen(FullUri) - 1);
    end;

When I test the function, the & separators don’t appear between the query parameters in the final URL, but if I change the ParamsSeparator to something else (like #), the URL is built correctly with that separator.

For example, calling the function with this input:

dict1.Add('key', 'daskdkakdakda');
dict1.Add('someVal', '123412314');
dict1.add('third', 'sdakda');
Message(GetUriWithQueryParams('http://api.weatherapi.com/v1/current.json', dict1));

Produces this result:

http://api.weatherapi.com/v1/current.json?key=daskdkakdakdasomeVal=123412314third=sdakda

It seems like the & symbol is just ignored.

Is there something I’m missing about how AL handles the & character in strings or URLs? Has anyone encountered this issue before or knows how to fix it?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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Answers (1)

Suggested answer

Khushbu Rajvi. 17,402 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

Hope this helps as well: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/excelgeneral/cant-join-two-data-cells-with-ampersand/3048261

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/search-for-ampersand/298aaf42-34e7-4ff5-8a9a-1d96c00f894c
Verified answer

Mohammad Usman Sajid 2 on at

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Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

Hi, after trying out many different things.

Just found this out:

ParamsSeparator := '&&';
Gerardo Rentería Ga... 19,937 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

Hi

I h ope this can help Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to encode and decode URL/HTML (UrlEncode, UrlDecode, HtmlEncode, and HtmlDecode) | Dynamics 365 Lab (yzhums.com)

Best

GR
CU-13072004-0 16 on at

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Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

It doesn't work.

It's a little dumb as it literally interprets it as the sequence {%,2,6}. Also when I try to assign this value ('%26') to a char variable, it says

Cannot implicitly convert type 'Text' to 'Char'

And consequently if we assign '%26' to a text variable (to fix the compiler error), so e.g. TextVar := '%26', and we write Message(TextVar), this code would produce a pop up with the message '%26', not the & symbol.
Vahid Ghafarpour 11,787 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Issue with Ampersand (&) Not Appearing when Concatenating

I suggest trying this change:

ParamsSeparator := '%26'; // URL-encoded ampersand