Question

When I first submit my search form via $_GET it returns results as expected but when using pagination and submitting it again for page X I see that it converts a portion of my URL and fails.

Here is the before and after URL portion that is changing:

// Before
min_score=1&max_score=10&not_scored=1

// After
min_score=1&max_score=10%AC_scored=1

It’s encoding 10& How can I prevent this from happening?

Answer 1

The reason is that &not gets intepreted by the browser as ¬. Strict mode or any DOCTYPE might help.

And ¬ simply gets substituted as ¬ then. Which in turn becomes %AC in request urls.

Besides urlencode() on the individual values you should additionally apply htmlspecialchars() on the whole URL before you add it into the <a> tag.