[SOLVED] file_get_contents and characters in a URL problem

[bigtimslim]

I use the file_get_contents function to get the html from a page. I parse through that page and get a specific url I want. It looks similar to this:

 

http://www.domain.com/index.cfm?action=blah&ID=5000

 

Now I want to file_get_contents the above url. I understand that the & is for html so I tried to convert the string to work as a url. I tryed both using urlencode function on the query of this url and just manually through php replacing with what I thought were the appropriate characters with no luck. Can anyone help, or point me in the right direction?

[Caesar]

<?php

  $url = str_replace('&','&','http://www.domain.com/index.cfm?action=blah&ID=5000');

?>

[discomatt]

You want to convert HTML special characters back to their originals

 

http://php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php

[Caesar]

There's that. ;-)

[bigtimslim]

Thanks very much guys for the quick replies. Caesar I thought tried that same exact thing last night... then I said what the heck and tried your code and of course it worked.  I must have been doing something stupid.

 

Thanks for the link discomatt that is exactly what I needed.