Outlook changing special characters to HTML encoded form

Question

Outlook changing special characters to HTML encoded form

Sandeep Singh 6

Hello,
I am trying to add an event to outlook by using following link:

https://outlook.live.com/calendar/0/deeplink/compose?rru=addevent&subject=Testing+%26&startdt=2022-07-09T07:00:00Z&enddt=2022-07-10T07:00:00Z&allday=true&location=somelocation&body=hello&path=/calendar/action/compose

But when outlook extract info from this URL and renders Add Event modal, then subject displays the HTML encoded value for the special characters added. Above example shows the text i added to subject was as follows:
Original Subject: Testing &
In URL it was URL encoded as: Testing+%26
Rendered Subject: Testing &

Please help here how we can pass on the special characters in the URL itself so that outlook can display them properly.

2 answers

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Answer 1

Faery Fu-MSFT 19,751 Moderator

Hi @Sandeep Singh ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum and posting your question using the tag” office-outlook-itpro” which mainly focus on general issues about Outlook desktop client, and we do know little about URL Encoding.

From your description, do you want to create an Add to calendar link in an email message?

As far as I know, from Outlook iteself, you can create an event then forword it as icalendar, now the .ice file will be an attachment in message.
More information in this sofficial document for your reference: Create an Add to calendar link in an email message

Hope this can help you!

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Faery Fu-MSFT 19,751 Reputation points Moderator

2022-05-26T06:33:26.367+00:00

Hi @Sandeep Singh ,
Do you think my reply is helpful to you, if so, please mark the reply as answer, this will make answer searching in the forum easier and be beneficial to other community members as well. Thanks for your understanding.
Sandeep Singh 6 Reputation points

2022-06-06T07:28:22.97+00:00

Hi FaeryFu-MSFT, thanks for your response, but we want to embed that link on our UI and clicking upon this link should redirect users to Outlook and should open a create event modal, with pre-filled values that were sent in the URL. So we want to do it by using this link and not manually.

Answer 2

Robert Sparnaaij [MVP] 1,816 MVP Volunteer Moderator

Nice find!

I've done some additional testing and it looks like the issue restricts itself to just the ampersand character within the subject definition.

Other URL encoded characters seem to work correctly and the URL encoded ampersand also gets interpreted correctly within the location and body definition.

As I can also reproduce the issue for Exchange Online, I've alerted the Exchange Team about this issue.

Sandeep Singh 6 Reputation points

2022-06-06T07:24:31.037+00:00

Hi @Robert Sparnaaij [MVP] thanks for for your time here, please let us also know, if you get any solution for the same.

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Outlook changing special characters to HTML encoded form

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