The tool I use for managing my local CentOS-3 mirror has started to choke on some changes to the centos mirrors.

The URL I am using is: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-3/3/updates/i386/

And I get the error: /tmp/rpmfindjLOxxX:271: error: htmlParseEntityRef: expecting ';' to donate a server: <a href="mailto:johnny@centos.org?subject=Server Donation&c

The offending html is: <a href="mailto:johnny@centos.org?subject=Server Donation&cc=lance@centos.org ">Contact us</a>

I am not using rpmfind, but reusing code I wrote for rpmfind (the http/html downloader).

The problem appears to be libxml (libxml2-2.4.19-6.ent) barfing. I wonder though if the page being generated by the server is valid?

As a workaround I pointed to: http://master.centos.org/centos-3/3/updates/i386/ which works but kind of defeats the purpose.

...

I checked the page with the w3c html valiadtor. Not good http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmirror.centos.org%2Fcentos-3%...

Line 57, column 206: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "cc"

...y@centos.org?subject=Server Donation&cc=lance@centos.org ">Contact us</a></b>

An entity reference was found in the document, but there is no reference by that name defined. Often this is caused by misspelling the reference name, unencoded ampersands, or by leaving off the trailing semicolon (;). The most common cause of this error is unencoded ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands in URLs".

Entity references start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). If you want to use a literal ampersand in your document you must encode it as "&amp;" (even inside URLs!). Be careful to end entity references with a semicolon or your entity reference may get interpreted in connection with the following text. Also keep in mind that named entity references are case-sensitive; &Aelig; and &aelig; are different characters.

Note that in most documents, errors related to entity references will trigger up to 5 separate messages from the Validator. Usually these will all disappear when the original problem is fixed.

John.