[thelist] ASP: help with forms and ampersand

[Michael Galvin]

I have a form on my page, which is posting to an asp page.

I found tonight that I had problems if the user used a character like &, or
' in any of the fields on the form, so I changed the method of the form from
GET to POST.

Problem solved!

Unfortunately, I've now opened up a world of pain for myself.

The full story:  I have a form with 10 elements on it, but only the first 3
are mandatory.  If the user fills in the first 3 AND NO MORE, he should go
directly to the "thank you" page.  If he fills in any more than the first 3,
I want to go to an interim page which asks them for even more information
(the client's idea)

So, originally, I had the form GETting the data, and then I used a bit of JS
to redirect the browser based on whether the user had entered data for the
first 3 fields only or not.

Now, being clever, I decided to create a variable which consisted of the
previous form's field names with their passed values, so
"name=Michael&address=Dublin&..." etc.  I tacked this on to the name of the
page I was redirecting to.  Worked like a charm, but this is just recreating
the function of a GET.  My problem with the ampersands is back!

(If name is "Michael&Miriam", it only picks up "Michael", in case it's not
clear what my problem is)

I should probably add that the form is on a page called you.asp, and it
posts to you.asp so that the same page can validate and stuff.  Basically,
if life was beautiful, I'd want to post to 3 different pages depending on
what the user puts in the form.

So, is there a way around this?  I'm pretty sure there's a MUCH better way
of handling all this, and that there are people at home right now rolling
their eyes at the amatuerness (word?) of it all, but I'm tired and I want to
go to bed.

Can you help?
TIA
Michael