Are Ampersands Stored Differently in SharePoint 2010 Than SharePoint 2007? – Part 2

Yesterday I posted Are Ampersands Stored Differently in SharePoint 2010 Than SharePoint 2007? This one has really gotten me interested. I decided to try calling the Lists Web Service with SPServices to see if there’s a difference in what is returned for the exact same items in SharePoint 2007 versus SharePoint 2010 (post upgrade).

Here’s what I get doing a simple alert on the GetListItems response for the source item in the Navigation Areas list for the Lookup column in SharePoint 2007

and for the Lookup column in Navigation SubAreas itself:

So in both cases, the ampersand is escaped.

Here’s what I see from SharePoint 2010 using exactly the same SPServices call to GetListItems for the the source item in Navigation Areas for the Lookup column

and for the Lookup column in Navigation SubAreas itself:

Hmm. Here, in both cases the ampersands are escaped as well.

So it would seem that the underlying storage of the value is the same in SharePoint 2010 as it is in SharePoint 2007. That would seem to mean that it must be SharePoint Designer 2010 being smarter than SharePoint Designer 2007 as well as the Data View Web Part (DVWP) being smarter in 2010.