Hi All
$cat = "Book";
$subCat = "Fiction & nonFiction";

For example:
<a href="xxx.php?category=<%print $cat;%>&subCat=<%print $subCat;%>"><% print $cat.$subCat; %>

What i want to do is to search in my database to find a match, then return details information for this record. The trouble is that it won't return anything if value of a variable includes "&". Is there a reason php rejects it? I tried to replace the & with and, then it worked, but that was not what i want. My background is asp, so i don't know why php has problem with the ampersand.

Please help. Thank you

I assume you want to use the ampersand literally in the query string and not as an argument separator. In which case you could use the functions urlencode /urldecode. Which will encode the query string so you could avoid PHP treating an ampersand value as an argument separator.

http://www.php.net/urlencode
http://www.php.net/urldecode

So essentially you pass the $variable to your link like this:

<a href="xxx.php?category=<%print urlencode($cat);%>&subCat=<%print urlencode($subCat);%>"><% print urlencode($cat.$subCat); %>

And then pass the string back through urldecode.

ASP-style delimiters are a bad idea..
Here is an FAQ that I wrote that discusses why as well as how to use a standards-compliant url-embedded argument separator:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4028

: )
Rich

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Smiling Souls
http://www.smilingsouls.net
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Thank you so much Smiling Souls,

I got it. Perfect.

trang

<rant>
Please, for the love of all things decent, do NOT use ASP-style <% %> tags as PHP delimiters!!! You're much better off ALWAYS using <?php and ?>.
</rant>

=)

Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/