How to preserve an ampersand (&) while using FOR XML PATH on SQL 2005

Question

Are there any tricks for preventing SQL Server from entitizing chars like &, <, and >? I'm trying to output a URL in my XML file but SQL wants to replace any '&' with '&'

Take the following query:

SELECT 'http://foosite.com/' + RTRIM(li.imageStore)
        + '/ImageStore.dll?id=' + RTRIM(li.imageID)
        + '&raw=1&rev=' + RTRIM(li.imageVersion) AS imageUrl
FROM ListingImages li
FOR XML PATH ('image'), ROOT ('images'), TYPE

The output I get is like this (&s are entitized):

<images>
  <image>
    <imageUrl>http://foosite.com/pics4/ImageStore.dll?id=7E92BA08829F6847&amp;amp;raw=1&amp;amp;rev=0&lt;/imageUrl&gt;
  </image>
</images>

What I'd like is this (&s are not entitized):

<images>
  <image>
    <imageUrl>http://foosite.com/pics4/ImageStore.dll?id=7E92BA08829F6847&amp;raw=1&amp;rev=0&lt;/imageUrl&gt;
  </image>
</images>

How does one prevent SQL server from entitizing the '&'s into '&'?

Answer 1

What SQL Server generates is correct. What you expect to see is not well-formed XML. The reason is that & character signifies the start of an entity reference, such as &. See the XML specification for more information.

When your XML parser parses this string out of XML, it will understand the & entity references and return the text back in the form you want, so the internal format in the XML file should not cause a problem to you unless you're using a buggy XML parser, or trying to parse it manually (in which case your current parser code is effectively buggy at the moment with respect to the XML specification).