I realized a pretty obvious problem with my search, but don’t know how to fix it. Say someone searches for “Hello there” it would of course come up something like ?s=Hello+there in the URL.
However, how do I deal with people searching for something like “Hello & such”? The browser will read the second query as ?s=Hello+&+such which makes it stop the search variable at “Hello”. I have the same problem with the pound symbol. If someone searches for something with the pound symbol, it gets added on as though it’s a URL fragment, rather than part of the search query.
I can’t seem to find information for how to handle this, can anyone give me a hand?
This is where encoding and escaping comes into play. For php see url encode.
However due to the nature of your problem I think you are rather looking for js function:
Encode URL in JavaScript