fopen a URL with = in it

Something that's been driving me crazy for a few days. Could it be a bug in PHP? Using the fopen function (or even the file function), I want to open a web page for read. Sounds easy? Well, say I want to have an "=" sign in the URL.. well that is where the problem comes. I have tried things like this: $eq = urlencode("="); $URL = "http://www.something.com/file.php?thing".$eq."thething";; I have tried many other combinations as well.. the problem is this: when PHP calls fopen(), it does not allow the = sign in the variable passed in. So I figured I should escape it.. fopen("http://www.something.com/file.php?thing\=thething","r";); But that did not work either. It allows me to pass it in, but then it tries to open the literal \= in the url, which of course doesn't exist. The url has just an =. I thought encoding the whole or part URL would work. well it loads the page, but the page itself doesn't recognize the encoded = sign as being an = sign.. Bah! Anyone have any ideas.. ? Corey Chapman Xnull CEO (Chat with us: http://forum.xnull.com)