The entity name must immediately follow the in the entity reference

Question

I want to put a packman game on my   xhtml page  I am using jsf 2 and primefaces 3 5   However   when I  translated  the html page in xhtml I get an error at this script        lt script gt       var el   document getElementById  pacman         if  Modernizr canvas  amp  amp  Modernizr localstorage  amp  amp           Modernizr audio  amp  amp   Modernizr audio ogg    Modernizr audio mp3           window setTimeout function      PACMAN init el            0         else          el innerHTML    Sorry  needs a decent browser lt br   gt  lt small gt                firefox 3 6   Chrome 4   Opera 10  and Safari 4   lt  small gt             lt  script gt    At line   if  Modernizr canvas  amp  amp  Modernizr localstorage  amp  amp     i get      The entity name must immediately follow the   amp   in the entity   reference    Any idea how to fix that

User · Answer

The parser is expecting some HTML content, so it sees & as the beginning of an entity, like è.

Use this workaround:

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
Javascript code here
// ]]>
</script>

so you specify that the code is not HTML text but just data to be used as is.

User · Answer

All answers posted so far are giving the right solutions  however no one answer was able to properly explain the underlying cause of the concrete problem  Facelets is a XML based view technology which uses XHTML XML to generate HTML output  XML has five special characters which has special treatment by the XML parser    lt  the start of a tag   gt  the end of a tag   quot  the start and end of an attribute value    the alternative start and end of an attribute value   amp  the start of an entity  which ends with      In case of  amp  which is not followed by    e g   amp  160    amp  xA0   etc   the XML parser is implicitly looking for one of the five predefined entity names lt  gt  amp  quot and apos  or any manually defined entity name  However  in your particular case  you was using  amp  as a JavaScript operator  not as an XML entity  This totally explains the XML parsing error you got   The entity name must immediately follow the   amp   in the entity reference  In essence  you re writing JavaScript code in the wrong place  a XML document instead of a JS file  so you should be escaping all XML special characters accordingly  The  amp  must be escaped as  amp amp   So  in your particular case  the if  Modernizr canvas  amp  amp  Modernizr localstorage  amp  amp    must become if  Modernizr canvas  amp amp  amp amp  Modernizr localstorage  amp amp  amp amp   to make it XML-valid  However  this makes the JavaScript code harder to read and maintain  As stated in Mozilla Developer Network s excellent document Writing JavaScript for XHTML  you should be placing the JavaScript code in a character data  CDATA  block  Thus  in JSF terms  that would be   lt h outputScript gt       lt   CDATA                        gt   lt  h outputScript gt   The XML parser will interpret the block s contents as  quot plain vanilla quot  character data and not as XML and hence interpret the XML special characters  quot as-is quot   But  much better is to just put the JS code in its own JS file which you include by  lt script src gt   or in JSF terms  the  lt h outputScript gt    lt h outputScript name  quot onload js quot  target  quot body quot    gt    note the target  quot body quot   this way JSF will automatically render the  lt script gt  at the very end of  lt body gt   regardless of where  lt h outputScript gt  itself is located  hereby achieving the same effect as with window onload and   document  ready    so you don t need to use those anymore in that script  This way you don t need to worry about XML-special characters in your JS code  As an additional bonus  this gives you the opportunity to let the browser cache the JS file so that total response size is smaller  See also   Error Parsing  page xhtml  Error Traced line  42  The entity  quot nbsp quot  was referenced  but not declared Is it possible to use JSF Facelets with HTML 4 5  How to reference CSS   JS   image resource in Facelets template  Writing JavaScript for XHTML

User · Answer

Do   lt script gt    lt   CDATA         script         gt  lt  script gt

User · Answer

Just in case someone from Blogger arrives  I had this problem when using Beautify extension in VSCode  Don  t use it  don  t beautify it

User · Answer

If you use XHTML  for some reason  note that XHTML 1 0 C 4 says     Use external scripts if your script uses  lt  or  amp  or     or --     That is  don   t embed script code inside a script element but put it into a separate JavaScript file and refer to it with  lt script src  foo js  gt  lt  script gt

User · Answer

You need to add a CDATA tag inside of the script tag  unless you want to manually go through and escape all XHTML characters  e g   amp  would need to become  amp amp     For example    lt script gt     lt   CDATA  var el   document getElementById  pacman     if  Modernizr canvas  amp  amp  Modernizr localstorage  amp  amp       Modernizr audio  amp  amp   Modernizr audio ogg    Modernizr audio mp3       window setTimeout function      PACMAN init el            0     else      el innerHTML    Sorry  needs a decent browser lt br   gt  lt small gt            firefox 3 6   Chrome 4   Opera 10  and Safari 4   lt  small gt           gt   lt  script gt

[javascript] The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference

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