Passing string to twitter fails after ampersand

Question

Good morning,

I am trying to pass a string to twitter, using the following code

// The message you want to send
$message = "http://www.smartphonesoft.com/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=viewlink&link_id=" .$link_id . " " ."Android Software" . " " .$link_name . " " . $metadesc;

// The twitter API address
$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';
// Alternative JSON version
// $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

However all that appears on twitter is a link to

http://www.smartphonesoft.com/index.php?option=com_mtree

as can be seen here http://twitter.com/smartphonesft

How can I get it pass everything after the ampersand?

Answer 1

You need to encode the url with urlencode:

$message = urlencode($message);