title: How do I prevent jQuery $.ajax from adding a leading ampersand to the query string in the request?
body: <p>I'm trying to avoid handling this improperly encoded request on the server. I have a request with a single parameter like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$.ajax({
      url: "http://someplace.ontheinternets/count?",
      data: {
          days_since_epoch: 15460
      },
      dataType: "json",
      success: function(data) {
          // Do something with data
      }
  });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is giving me: <a href="http://someplace.ontheinternets/count?&amp;days_since_epoch=15460" rel="nofollow">http://someplace.ontheinternets/count?&amp;days_since_epoch=15460</a></p>
  
  <p>The leading ampersand is giving me problems on the other end (interpreted as two parameters with the first one being empty). Seems like an easy fix, but I did not see this specific issue in the related questions. Any suggestions would be helpful.</p>