IE javascript html encoding weirdness

Put this in your location bar in IE

javascript:location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q=something&lt=bar'

Watch in horror as it helpfully thinks &lt actually means < and makes it a <.

WTF is going on here?

Other browsers don't do开发者_C百科 this. How do I prevent IE from doing this?

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Since this is part of an HTML document you should escape the & by replacing it by &

An ampersand '&' in HTML mark the start of a character reference entity such as < > and é

Literal ampersands in your document should be written as &

Note that if that code is generated dynamical you should also escape the URL so that it can appear in a JavaScript string as well.

Edited: I can confirm this particular problem occurs when pasting JavaScript code directly in the address bar. It seems HTML character escaping rules are irrelevant here after all.

I've googled a bit and found this blog post which identify that particular behavior as an ie bug.