599763 - HTML Special Characters Rendered Without Trailing Semicolon

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Robert Schaffrath]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)

This appears to be related to bug 171367 though it is occurring in the browser.  I was viewing a page that had a clear text link to Google.  One of the URL arguments was &sub=.  When displayed, the page had a large break before and after the URL and the &sub= was replaced with a special characters.  After doing some experimenting, I discovered that any URL argument that mimics a special HTML character such as &amp=, &lt=, &gt=, etc. will not be displayed correctly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a web page with a visible URL that includes an argument using &sub=, &amp= and &lt=.
2. View the page in Firefox.  &sub= causes the most disruption so far.
3.
Actual Results:  
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8⊂=search for &sub=
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8&=search for &amp=
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8<=search for &lt=

Expected Results:  
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8&sub=search
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8&amp=search
http://www.google.com/ie=UTF-8&lt=search

Comment 1

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Reporter -> Are you still experiencing this issue with the latest version of Firefox 5? Does the issue occur with the latest nightly? http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Can you attach a screenshot or test case that shows the issue?

Comment 2

[Robert Schaffrath]

The bug for &sub= appears solved.  It now renders properly on the screen and in a URL.  &amp= and &lt= still render as their respective unencoded characters but I would probably expect that behavior.  The URL itself, when used in an HREF, is rendered correctly with those character strings.

Comment 3

[Tim (fmdeveloper)]

Robert -> Still seeing with Firefox 11? Can you attach a screenshot or test case that shows the issue?

Comment 4

[Robert Schaffrath]

Attachment: Simple test HTML document to display special entity bug

A simple test HTML document to display the special entity bug.  &sub works correctly.

Comment 5

[Robert Schaffrath]

Attachment: A screen capture from FF 11 of the test.html document being rendered

A screen capture from FF 11 of the test.html document being rendered

Comment 6

[Robert Schaffrath]

Under FF 11, the &sub issue is still fixed but the cases noted above for &amp=, &lt= as well as a test of &gt= continue to fail. It appears the parser is not checking for a trailing semicolon and is assuming the string is a special entity.  Ideally &amp= would display as written but &= would display as an ampersand.