PHP/MySQL - Special characters in URLs. How to avoid?

Question

My database contains information extracted from an external feed. In this raw text feed, the following text is used in place of special characters:

& - &         


        

Answer 1

You should encode the brand=Franklin&Hédgson's before creating the link, if you are generating the link with php use urlencode http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php

Then you can use htmlentities to encode the query before sending it off to mysql in a query http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php