HTTP_GET_VARS question

I am new to PHP, if someone could help I would appreciate it. I have an extensive site that was built in ASP on an NT 4.0 server with IIS 4.0. I am trying to convert that site to run on a Linux box with PHP, Apache and MySQL (or PostgreSQL, haven't decided yet). I ran a utility distributed with RedHat 7, called asp2php to convert all ASP code to PHP. It did a great job, but since I was using session variables in ASP, the utility converted these to HTTP_GET_VARS variables. The problem is, that some of these variables contain spaces and commas. PHP looks like it is parsing these variables based on these common separator characters. For example, a variable that should be set to: 'Balls, Bars, and Logs' is actually set to 'Balls,' Is there a setting I need to tweak, or should I use a different way of passing variables from page to page?