[Koha] Potential dangers of ampersands in authorised values. (Advisory only).

[Raymund Delahunty]

The ampersand can be rendered badly in webpages (as & rather than &) and also in title data in downloaded Koha reports. But we recently stumbled across another ampersand issue, where we had an ampersand in the NOT_LOAN authorised value. In OPAC, titles with the NOT_LOAN status with the ampersand (for example 'In processing at Resources & Systems') would sometimes display with only the image, and no bibliographic data.

This was found to lead to errors in the logs reporting the xslt stylesheets were unable to process the ampersand.

[2021/12/29 09:53:15] [WARN] XSLT::Base: :167: parser error : xmlParseEntityRef: no name code><status>reallynotforloan</status><substatus>Received at Library Resources & .
Replacing & with 'and' solved the problem. Going forward we will avoid ampersands in authorised values where a webserver may be involved.
Ray Delahunty
University of the Arts London
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