php, mySQL query character problem

Hi, I have a query to mysql basically saying: $query = "select * from table1 where colum1 like '$email%'"; //where $email is defined string. When i "echo $query", I get the string : select * from table 1 where colum1 like 'testdata%' If i copy paste the string into phpMyAdmin SQL, the query executes successfully and returns one record. However, when I just do $returnValue = QueryDatabase($query); echo mysql_num_rows($returnValue); I always get 0 for the # of records. Does anyone know what causes this? Also... the value i have for $email is from: $email=explode("@",$emailAddress); $email=$email[0]; Thanks, Victor C.