help with "&" character

i've ran in to a problem with the "&" character in the database i'm developing. when i add a name to the database something like "tom & jerry" it's stored in the table under the name field.

when i do a search for it, it'll show up in the results. a link will show up for it, but when you click the link it won't retrieve the data, saying it's not in the database. when i tried to fix it, i just got it to print out what the value is and i got just "tom" the "& jerry" part was missing.

i', assuming php is taking the & for a logical & operator, how do i fix this?

The problem is that you have to URL-encode your search. This page for instance has the following URL:
http://www.devshed.com/cgi-bin/ubb/...|QUT|+character

Everytime a & is encountered it is enterpreted as a new key-value pair. So Tom&Jerry will cause an error if this is not encoded. You can check the PHP manual for the functions:

-urlencode
-urldecode
-rawurlencode
-rawurldecode

Success.

thanks, i used urlencode and it works fine now, thanks again!