Ampersand not displaying properly in synchronised events

zogstrip · April 8, 2026, 2:12pm

Thanks for the report @nathank It’ll be fixed by

github.com/discourse/discourse

FIX: Prevent HTML-encoding of special characters in ICS feeds (#39152)

main ← fix/ics-ampersand-encoding

merged 02:43PM - 08 Apr 26 UTC

ZogStriP

+45 -3

ERB's `<%= %>` calls `ERB::Util.html_escape` on all non-`html_safe` strings, eve…n in non-HTML templates like `.ics.erb`. This caused ampersands (and potentially other special characters) to be double-encoded as `&` in calendar subscription feeds, which external calendar apps like Google Calendar displayed verbatim. Mark `IcalEncoder.encode` output as `html_safe` since it already performs all necessary ICS encoding (HTML sanitization, entity decoding, RFC 5545 escaping). Also route the URL fields in both ICS templates through `IcalEncoder.encode` for consistency. https://meta.discourse.org/t/400166

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Ampersand not displaying properly in synchronised events

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