passing & symbol in proc http

[putteringpluie]

I have the following code which fails if users have the character '&' in their password (myPW).

I know that data _null_ statement is working as expected 'input' is resolving to the correct string. The problem seems to be in the 'in=' statement in proc http. How do I make sure that the correct string is being input in proc http?

filename input TEMP;
filename resp TEMP;
filename headers TEMP;


%LET myPW=%STR(xxxxxx);
%LET myID=%STR(xxxxxx);

data _null_;
	file input recfm=f lrecl=1;
	put "RS_action=signOn%nrstr(&RS_userName)=&myID.%nrstr(&RS_password)=&myPW";
run;




proc http
	method="POST"
	url="http://xxxxx:####"
	in=input
	headerout=headers
	out=resp
	HEADEROUT_OVERWRITE;
run;

SAS version 9.4

[Tom]

You need to show what you think the resulting text should look like.

If you want to use & in your strings without SAS thinking you want to reference a macro variable then why not just use single quotes?

Also not sure how you expect SAS write such a long string to a file that has records of only 1 byte each?

%LET myPW=%STR(xxxxxx);
%LET myID=%STR(xxxxxx);

data _null_;
  file input ;
  put 'RS_action=signOn&RS_userName=' "&myID." '&RS_password=' "&myPW";
run;

[putteringpluie]

Thank you for the reply. 

It gives me the same result as the original code. It works for passwords that do not have '&' character, but fails if the password has that character. When I look at 'input', the password is resolving correctly though. 

[Tom · Accepted solution]

The use URLENCODE() function to convert the string before writing it.
Or possible you want the HTMLENCODE() function instead.

[putteringpluie]

Thank you. Searching for urlencode lead me to this: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2018/04/04/htmlencode-urlencode/.

Which told me that I have to use urlencode function so I can 'eecape' the ampersand symbol in my code. Adding that funtion to my password variable helped me resolve this issue.