taxonomy name filter to get terms with special characters I am getting my term description using taxonomy_get_term_by_name().

I'm having problems with term names like "barnes &amp; noble" and "Café"; I guess it must have something to do with the special characters. How can I filter my taxonomy name input the best way to get back term results?

I'm using the function in a views-view-list.tpl.php template, where $title is outputting the taxonomy; then I use $title with the following code.

$terms = taxonomy_get_term_by_name($title, 'places');


$title seems to be stripped from all kind of htmltags - its plain text.
It was only the &amp; charter there was making problems.
This was the solution:

$terms = taxonomy_get_term_by_name(str_replace('&amp;amp;', '&amp;', $title), 'places');