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

That's because a '&' within a URL starts a new GET variable. The '?' starts your query string with has 2 items in it, 'brand' = "Franklin" and undefined = "Hédgson's".

Here is a list of URL escape codes that you should use whenever any of those characters appear in your URL (inside a value, of course). So, the '&' needs to be escaped to '%26' when it is put into the string so that the GET will read it properly.