Need help...silly customer

OK, I have the customer from hell here. I created a script for her that allows her to add featured items, including an image. I tested it pretty well, except that all the images that the php script uploads has no special characters. So, she uploads an image that has a special character in the name and the image link won;t work. Of course. what happens is that the image uploads and puts a time stamp in front of it. I thought that was nice since she could have duplicate image names. At this point the whole name is written to the database with the proper spaces and special characters. When the file is moved to the correct directory by the script, the name is maintained with the spaces and special characters. The problem is the number sign she insists on using!!!! She wants to name them "Sofa #184-8.JPG". The browser must interpret the # sign as something else. I can not remember the name of that. Is there a way around this? TIA, Shane