It's not supposed to escape those because those are legal characters in a URL. (Didn't we do this one already?)

There's nothing wrong with a URL of

http://www.stonehenge.comm/cgi/foobar/fred&barney
[download]

That doesn't mean that fred or barney are query parameters. The ampersand is only of some significance after the question mark.

If you want to build a query string from pieces, use the proper part of URI... the parts with the word query in them.

Stop trying to use the wrong tool for the wrong job in the wrong way.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker