[twitter-dev] Twitter message with html entities get truncated

[mndasher]

I store my content in a MySQL database. The website is using PHP. Data
fields are encoded so that html tags are using entities; i.e.  <p> =
&lt;p&gt;  When I query the database I decode the entities, and then
strip the tags. That works fine. But some entities don't get
converted. So &nbsp; causes a problem for a cURL message. The message
is truncated at the ampersand.  So I did a string replace where &nbsp;
becomes a space.  So that solved one problem. But ampersand is still a
problem. Neither &amp; or simply & work. The both result in a
truncated message.  A string replace of &amp; with 'and' seems to
work. But is kind of weird.

I have also tried utf8_encode($message) but I don't see any difference
in the output or the result with the API.

All of the API help and samples I have seen use a very simple message
example. I have not seen any help on how to format the actual
message.  I saw some where that it should be UTF-8. Mostly the
messages are plain text, but these two characters cause problems. So
do quotes and single quotes as far as that goes.  If I add slashes the
slashes come through in the final message.

Is there any real help for these problems?