& symbol problem in htaccess

Question

hello.... my current url is

categories_name.php?cname=at&t

rewritten url like this.

carriers/at&t

this is htaccess url.

RewriteRule ^carriers/(.*)$ categories_name.php?cname=$1 [L]

above url is working for all like

categories_name.php?cname=all-tel

when variable(at&t) has '&' symbol then problem occuring. so how to write htaccess url?

Answer 1

Try it with the B flag for backreference escaping:

RewriteRule ^carriers/(.*)$ categories_name.php?cname=$1 [L,B]

Answer 2

& is a separator between different arguments in the querystring. at&t must therefore be urlencoded like this: at%26t otherwise PHP will see it as if you had two arguments: cname and t