# Mautic changes link including & and returns 404

**URL:** <https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-changes-link-including-and-returns-404/24568>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [June 23, 2022, 5:04pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-changes-link-including-and-returns-404/24568 "2022-06-23T17:04:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gnumax](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/gnumax/32/7061_2.png) [@gnumax](https://forum.mautic.org/u/gnumax)\
**Post date:** [June 23, 2022, 5:04pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-changes-link-including-and-returns-404/24568/1 "2022-06-23T17:04:08Z")

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Hi support,

When I use a link that includes ampersand **&** such as [https://domain.com/cart\_php=?a=add&amp;pid=229](https://domain.com/cart_php=?a=add&amp;pid=229) Mautic transforms it into [https://domain-mautic.com/r/66372e926da490a539c7fbb2a?ct=YTo1OntzOjY6InNvdXJjZSI7[...]jc6ImNoYW5uZWwiO2E6MTp7czo1OiJlbWFpbCI7aTo3Mjt9fQ%3D%3D&](https://domain-mautic.com/r/66372e926da490a539c7fbb2a?ct=YTo1OntzOjY6InNvdXJjZSI7%5B...%5Djc6ImNoYW5uZWwiO2E6MTp7czo1OiJlbWFpbCI7aTo3Mjt9fQ%3D%3D&) which in turn redirects to [https://domain.com/cart\_php=?a=add&pid=229](https://domain.com/cart_php=?a=add&pid=229) giving the error in the browser:

[https://mail.google.com/](https://mail.google.com/) /cart\_php=?a=add&pid=229 [customers.domain.com](http://customers.domain.com) Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10\_15\_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 404

Is it possible that Mautic doesn’t recognise the **&** character because it changes it in one of the links to **?** and it stops working as a link?

If I shorten the initial link [https://domain.com/cart\_php=?a=add&amp;pid=229](https://domain.com/cart_php=?a=add&amp;pid=229) with bitly or whatever, then it works, but if I use the original one that includes & it stops working.

Shouldn’t the links with & used in shopping carts or checkout pages work?

Any thoughts on this? 🤔

Mautic 4.3.1  
nginx: 1.16  
PHP: 7.4  
MariaDB: 10.3.32

Regards!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gnumax](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/gnumax/32/7061_2.png) [@gnumax](https://forum.mautic.org/u/gnumax)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2022, 9:18am UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-changes-link-including-and-returns-404/24568/2 "2022-06-29T09:18:33Z")

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Has anyone experienced this or something similar with the use of **&** in links that Mautic reinterprets?

🤗

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mleroux](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/mleroux/32/433_2.png) [@mleroux](https://forum.mautic.org/u/mleroux)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-changes-link-including-and-returns-404/24568/3 "2022-07-11T20:48:19Z")

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Yes, we just came across this when referencing internal Sharepoint files so the “…m / : b : / t…” [I had to put spaces in-between to stop it converting in this viewer] part of the URL is changed to  
 ![2022-07-12_6-45-09](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/mautic/original/2X/7/7e0c9c5acdbc62a85ee81bf94c2b3eb53f396f78.png) and seems to be converted to %F0%9F%85%B1 in the URL which causes it to have a 404

We are running 4.1.1.

Thanks for the idea of using a redirection URL as a work around!