Valid Paypal Buttons

So if you've attempted to make a PayPal button based on the data from PayPal you have something like this.


https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=email%40yourdomain.com
&item_name=Widget&item_number=001&
amount=15.00&no_note=1&amp;currency_code=USD

Now if you attempted to validate this for XHTML 1.0 you'd get this message:


Line ##, column 71: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "item_name" 
Line ##, column 80: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter 
Line ##, column 80: reference to external entity in attribute value 
Line ##, column 88: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "item_number" 
Line ##, column 99: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter 
Line ##, column 99: reference to external entity in attribute value 
Line ##, column 104: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "amount" 
Line ##, column 110: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter 
Line ##, column 110: reference to external entity in attribute value 
Line ##, column 117: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "no_note" 
Line ##, column 124: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter 
Line ##, column 124: reference to external entity in attribute value 
Line ##, column 127: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "currency_code" 
Line ##, column 140: reference not terminated by REFC delimiter 
Line ##, column 140: reference to external entity in attribute value

So, what's the solution?

A very simple one here:

Simply change all the & symbols to "&" like this:


https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=email%40yourdomain.com
&amp;item_name=Widget&amp;item_number=001&amp;
amount=15.00&amp;no_note=1&amp;currency_code=USD

Now, when you try to validate you code you'll get this(as long as you remember to reference the correct doctype)


This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

Discussion

MAR 3 2005 Michele

I`m still having problems validating, but I`m getting the error that <input> tags cannot be used inside <form> tags. Any idea how to get around this?

Yay Paypal.

Thanks! Michele

MAR 3 2005 Joe Maddalone

Try adding a " /" at the end of youre input tag(s) <input type="text" name="x" value="x" />

MAR 7 2005 Becky

Thank you! This finally helped my page validate. I appreciate it!