Special Characters Question

I am having a problem with the URL of my site and a query in which I use part of the URL to retrieve data in the database.

An example being, the URL in my browser is:

mydomain.co.uk/hotels/jugendherberge-st.-pölten

In my web page, I store this as:

$_SESSION['S_HOTEL_URL'] 	= $urlsection; // $urlsection is the last part of my URL

Then within another script loaded via AJAX, I have a query which has the following WHERE clause:

WHERE tblhotels.hotelurl = '".$_SESSION['S_HOTEL_URL']."'

Now, this is fairly straight forward however the string stored in the session is as follows:

[S_HOTEL_URL] => jugendherberge-st.-p%C3%B6lten

Obviously as a result of the session not matching the data in the database, the query cannot find any results.

Why is the session storing it differently?

How can I get this to work?

Many Thanks for reading.

Doug.

Simply [man]urldecode/man the string:

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

echo urldecode( 'jugendherberge-st.-p%C3%B6lten' ); // jugendherberge-st.-pölten