az pipeline embedded ampersand (&) breaks when passing key=value

Question

How to pass a value that has ampersand (&) and possibly other characters. the following powershell script fails

 $groupname = "owtest"
 $tags = @()
 $key="test"
 $value="some=&this&that"
 $tags += "$key=$value"
 $creation = az pipelines variable-group create --name $groupname --variables $tags --only-show-errors

Is there a workaround to allow the ampersand embedded character?

Answer 1

In my test, we must use double quotes(single quotes can't work for this scenario) for value which contains & or other characters. So if you pass variables directly to final command, it should be:

az pipelines variable-group create --name $groupname --variables test="some=&this&that" ...

And if you want to use the format above($tags += "$key=$value"), you need to use $value="""some=&this&that""" instead of $value="some=&this&that".