Simple HTML form to pass values to URL - html

Question

I have a simple HTML form with a select element. The purpose is this is to use Wordpress's built in query parameters to allow users to sort the posts in an archive. Date Added, Title, etc.
<form action="" method="GET">
<label id="sortLabel" for="orderby">Sort Songs:</label>
<select name="orderby" id="sortbox">
<option disabled selected>Sort by:</option>
<option value="date&order=asc">Oldest First</option>
<option value="date&order=dsc">Newest First</option>
<option value="title&order=asc">Alphabetical (A-Z)</option>
<option value="title&order=dsc">Alphabetical (Z-A</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Filter" />
</form>
The option values are being passed through to the URL fine, but the URLs are encoding, causing the URL to look like this:
www.example.com/songs/?orderby=date%26order%3Dasc
Instead of this:
www.example.com/songs/?orderby=date&order=asc

Answer 1

This is simply how HTML forms work.
The value attributes are arbitrary text. The browser is sending the form request to www.example.com/songs/?orderby=<value>, where you happen to be setting the <value> to "date&order=asc", "date&order=dsc", etc.
The orderby's value has to make it to the server intact. & and = are reserved characters in a URL's query component, so that is why they are being percent-encoded when the orderby field is added to the URL query, thus allowing the server to properly receive the <value> that the user selected for orderby in the HTML.
To do what you want, you need to treat orderby and order separately in the HTML. I would add a separate <select> for order, eg:
<form action="" method="GET">
<label id="sortLabel" for="orderby">Sort Songs:</label>
<select name="orderby" id="sortbox">
<option disabled selected>Sort by:</option>
<option value="date">Date</option>
<option value="title">Title</option>
</select>
<select name="order" id="sortbox">
<option disabled selected>Order by:</option>
<option value="asc">Oldest First, Alphabetical (A-Z)</option>
<option value="dsc">Newest First, Alphabetical (Z-A)</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Filter" />
</form>
If you wanted to make the order list a little cleaner, you could use client-side scripting to manipulate the display texts of the order options whenever the user selects a different orderby option.