passing a string containing "&" in a url

[glueater]

I want to pass a category name to another page...the category is "R&B" and is used to find other items containing "R&B" -- how can I pass this string along to the next page in a url since it has the & sign in it????

[laserlight]

You would change the & to &, perhaps by using [man]htmlspecialchars/man or [man]htmlentities/man

[swr]

If you're passing the variable in a hidden (or even non-hidden) form field, do what laserlight said.

If you're inserting the variable directly into a URL (for <a href="myscript.php?foo=bar"> or similar), look at the information and examples in the [man]urlencode/man manual page. Example 2 is what you want (which uses both urlencode() and htmlentities()).