AND(&) Symbol Messing Up Params

[cesarcesar]

I'm using the following AJAX code to send GET vars to my processing PHP file. This works great as is except that it will not accept a *&* (AND symbol) in the text input. It trys to pass what is after the *&* as a new GET var. I totaly get what is happening, just don't get how to fix it. I hope my example code is sufficient.

 

HTML:

<input type="text" class="inputbox" value="pb&j" id="input_name" name="input_name" onblur="javascript:makeRequest('my_file.php?new=',this.value);"/>

 

Javascript:

var http_request = false;
function makeRequest(url, parameters) { //alert(parameters)
http_request = false;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari,...
	http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();
	if (http_request.overrideMimeType) {
		// set type accordingly to anticipated content type
		//http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml');
		http_request.overrideMimeType('text/html');
	}
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
	try {
		http_request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
	} catch (e) {
		try {
			http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
		} catch (e) {}
	}
}
if (!http_request) {
	alert('Cannot create XMLHTTP instance');
	return false;
}
http_request.onreadystatechange = alertContents;

// FOR POST VARS
//http_request.open('POST', url, true);
//http_request.send(parameters);

// FOR GET VARS
http_request.open('GET', url + parameters + "&time=" + get_date(), true);
http_request.send(null);
}

function alertContents() {
if (http_request.readyState == 4) {
if (http_request.status == 200) {
    //alert(http_request.responseText);
    result = http_request.responseText;
    document.getElementById('myspan').innerHTML = result;
} else {
    alert('There was a problem with the request.');
}
}
}

[cesarcesar]

My solutions was to add the replace() function at line 2 of the following code.

 

function makeRequest(url, parameters) {
        parameters = parameters.replace(/&/g,"%26");
http_request = false;

        ... rest of function
}