> While & is illegal in XML and HTML it is perfectly legal (and
> required) in an URL. 

Just as in English, & is a legal letter in English, but when the
sentence is encoded into an XML or HTML file it needs to be encoded as
& Before being passed over the wire as part of a URI to retrieve a
document it will be parsed by an (XML or HTML) parser which will
interpret this as a single character.

> but it didn't address my problem. Unfortunately the server thinks these 
> two URLs are different:
> http://myserver/action.do?action=Approve&ID=7
> http://myserver/action.do?action=Approve&ID=7

they are different but they also have differnt encodings in html.
the first is
 http://myserver/action.do?action=Approve&ID=7
the second is
 http://myserver/action.do?action=Approve&ID=7


this is a FAQ

David