Problem with making dynamic site design

[m_leefs]

I'm trying to make a large science glossary with links to seperate pages that pulls information off a MySql database. I didn't want seperate pages for each definition, so I wanted to make dynamic pages. So far it works but I have problems when the word I want to link from have tough characters like "(" or "/" such as in "(A+T)/(G+C) ratio" Is there a way to keep such characters from being mis-recognized in the following PHP code?

Example:

$result = mysql_query(
"select wordID, word from glos");
while ($i = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
print <<<END
<a href="/definitions.php?word={$i['word']}">{$i['word']}</a><br>\n
END;
}

definitions.php:

$word = $_GET["word"];
$result = mysql_query(
"SELECT * FROM glos
where word = '$word'"
);
while ($i = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$def = $i["def"];
print "Definition of $word : <br><br>\n";
print "$def<br>\n";
}

Thanks.

[ergophobe]

You can work around it with addslashes, url encoding and so forth, but for all your trouble, you're going to end up with an obscure url with % signs and what not. I think you might want two cols, one for the "display name" and one for the "uri name" as in

www.domain.edu/AplusBoverDplusE/

If you're willing to give up "human readable" URIs, you can just use the id and have URIs like
www.domain.edu/definition.php?id=342

Tom