pregmatch an ampersand

[kiss-o-matic]

I've got a button on my site that will take the entire URL, change on of the values, and make it a URL. The problem is, it takes ampersands as just that, and not '&'. I'm trying to validate the page, but this little button is preventing me from doing it, on any page that has an ampersand in the URL.

I tried this:

[code]        
        if ( preg_match("/(.?)&(.?)/i", $whole_url) ) {
                echo 'match';
                $pat = '/(.?)&(.?)/';
                $rep = '$1' . '&' . '$2';
                $whole_url = preg_replace( $pat, $rep, $whole_url );

        }
[/code]

It doesn't print match though, so it's not matching. I even tried escaping the &, but to no avail. Am I missing something here?

[kiss-o-matic]

nevermind. I've discovered str_replace which works better.