I just tried this out (after a long delay), and it seems like it works for me - are you still seeing this problem?

matt.voysey wrote:

Hi Yaron, I tried this on a clean install of MediaWiki 1.17.0 with SemanticBundle 2011-08-24.20110824 (SemanticDrilldown 0.8.3) and the problem still occurred. So I decided to investigate further...

After some debugging I traced the problem to a difference in the SDAppliedFilter instance that gets created when using a combo box to enter filter values versus the standard list of values input type - I was seeing, for example, "Singer & Songwriter" in the first case, and "Singer & Songwriter" in the second.

Traced the cause of this to SD_AppliedFilter.php line 21, where the value of the _search_ parameter gets htmlspecialchars run on it. Removing this call fixed the problem with ampersands.

In SD_AppliedFilter.php line 21 - change:

$af->search_term = htmlspecialchars( str_replace( '_', ' ', $search_term ) );

to:

$af->search_term = str_replace( '_', ' ', $search_term );

I tested for possible side-effects of the above by creating some other values for property values with nasty <, >, " characters - it seems they already don't work very well with the combo box input (particularly for a value like "Artist" or <Artist> - just don't appear at all), but other values such as Builder's Merchant (containing apostrophe) work fine with or without the fix above.

This should be fixed in https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticDrilldown/pull/48