The best way to store &(Ampersand) in MySQL database

Question

I\'m building a category list and I\'m unsure how to store the Ampersand symbol in MySQL database. Is there any problem/disadvantage if I use \'&\'. Are the

Answer 1

You should store it as & only if the field in the DB contains HTML (like some text & more). In which case you should be very careful about XSS.

If the field contains some general data (like an username, title... etc) you should only escape it when you put it in your HTML (using htmlentities for example).