PHP: Variable not getting interpreted correctly?

I'm not really sure what question to ask because I'm not really sure what is causing it.

So here's what is happening.....

I have a function that starts off like this:

function core_stackoverflow_init($obj){
    $options = $obj->options;   
    $options->query = (string)$options->query;
    $options->query = "key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&answers=true&body=true&comments=true";

    $fp = fsockopen("api.stackoverflow.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

    if (!$fp){ 
        echo 'Could not connect to StackOverflow'; return false; 
    }

$out = "GET /1.1/".$options->resource."?".$options->query." HTTP/1.1\r\n";

When I echo $options->query for both lines 3 and 4, they echo out as the same thing, so I would think that $obj->options->query coming in should work fine. However, stackoverflow only gives me a full response back when I have line 4 in there (manually reassigning $options->query). I get a response back stackoverflow, but I don't get any comments, and if I move the &body=true, to later, I don't get the body. But if I use line 4, I get everything I'm expecting.

So it's like line 3 is being terminated or being interpreted incorrectly.

$obj is formed from a json_decode(), so I thought that maybe somehow the decode was casting it as an integer or something bizarre so that's why you see my casting the var back as a (string)....just to make sure.

I've tried urlencode() and trim to no avail.

Are there any special characters or something you can think of that I can test to debug this?

EDIT:

When var_dumping the variables mentions there is a big difference:

string(75) "body=true&answers=true&comments开发者_JAVA百科=true&key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
string(63) "key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&answers=true&body=true&comments=true"

So I did a trim($options->query) on the first value and go the same response.

????

Alright, I figured it out. Thanks for reminding me to var_dump.

So I did a bin2hex so I could look at the actual hex codes. It turned out the input was getting turned into html_entities from the browser.

So I did an html_entity_decode and it works.