Ampersand in URL is being saved to sitemap as "&" resulting in bad URL

[purchasing14]

Hi there.  We've been working to get XML Sitemaps automated and tuned so that we get the exact results that we're looking for; however, we're unable to determine why all URLs that include an "&" are being encoded as "&".

Here's a URL example that results in a bad request:
my.domain.com/OA_HTML/xxwv2ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?section=10370&item=1597404

The correct URL is:
my.domain.com/OA_HTML/xxwv2ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?section=10370&item=1597404


I'm interested in knowing if anyone else has ran into this issue and what was done to correct it.  Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance!

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Hello,

all links in sitemap are "urlencoded" according with sitemaps protocol: [ External links are visible to logged in users only ]

[purchasing14]

Per w3c, URL encoding for "&" is "%26", and in this case it's coding it like you would to put an & symbol into HTML code, which is incorrect for this use because it isn't usable by the browser in this format.

Reference: [ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

That document is for *HTML URL Encoding*, which doesn't apply to xml sitemap.