Stream: implementers
Topic: Ampersand in values
Karol Trojan (Aug 10 2017 at 12:40):
I would like to get an example of a FHIR search query with and ampersand in value and a sort specified. The exact resource of this sample query does not matter to me, I just want to know what kind of input I should expect if I would like to implement the standard. A perfect example would include 2 search fields, like patient firstname Al&Ewa and Lastname Lost sorted first by Lastname and then Firstname
Michel Rutten (Aug 10 2017 at 13:15):
Url parameters values should be url-encoded. Ampersand characters are encoded as %26.
frank cao (Jan 11 2019 at 21:02):
Is encoding necessary or can I just escape it as explained in https://www.hl7.org/fhir/search.html#escaping? If I just escape it by adding a backward slash in front of it, would that work?
Lloyd McKenzie (Jan 11 2019 at 21:10):
& isn't a special character. The 'special' rules are to allow embedding of certain characters that FHIR uses within search strings. & isn't one of those - we just use the default HTTP behavior there, which means that if it needs to be escaped, you use the HTTP escaping mechanism.
Ken Sinn (Jan 11 2019 at 21:45):
Consider the query http://abc.org/Organization?name=jack&jill&customparam=bestintown!
How does a server know to parse the parameters as:
parameter 1: "name"="jack&jill" and parameter 2: "customparam"="bestintown!"
as opposed to
parameter1: "name"="jack" and parameter 2: "jill" is a badly-formed parameter-value pair?
Michele Mottini (Jan 11 2019 at 21:50):
For the first case the & should be URL-encoded
Michele Mottini (Jan 11 2019 at 21:51):
normal HTTP rules
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
