Sanitizing title URLs in ExpressionEngine 1.6.x - content-management-system

Question

I run a blog where the blog title is either an external link or an internal link to a longer piece similar to what you’ve seen on similar blogs. For some reason, ExpressionEngine (1.6.x) does nothing to sanitize such things as ampersands in the URLs provided.
I use Markdown in the body text, which seems to do a great job of sanitizing all URLs. Yet, ExpressionEngine’s own handling of the titles doesn’t cut it. I have tried formatting the “title URLs” in Markdown and failed miserable, and damn if I know what the hell it is in ExpressionEngine that prevents me from using it.
So the question boils down to what other ExpressionEngine 1.6.x users do and have done, or whether someone can come up with a MacGyver-esque solution. Because I’ve been stumped upwards of half a year.

Answer 1

The XML Encode Plugin for EE1 from Rick Ellis of EllisLab will convert your special characters to HTML entities.
The plugin was originally designed to convert reserved XML characters to HTML entities in the ExpressionEngine RSS templates, but should work for what you need.
To use the plugin, wrap your {title_link} custom field in between its tag pairs:
{exp:xml_encode}
{title_link}
{/exp:xml_encode}
This would result in:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nytimes&btnG=Google+Search
Being converting into:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nytimes&btnG=Google+Search
Other EE1 Plugins which offer more similar but advanced features are Cleaner by utilitEEs (Oliver Heine) or Low Replace by Lodewijk Schutte.