Pagination With Search

[eluser]sszynrae[/eluser]
Hi, I'm wondering if anyone have come across this situation before:

as the CI pagination class needs to work with a fixed uri I decided to include the search string as one of the uri segments. im using a simple form to combine my search options and redirect to the correct uri.

the problem is that the allowed character set in a CI uri is much smaller than what a user is allowed to type into an html form. So if the user types 'beer&wine;' say, the CI illegal character error will occur. does anyone know a way to bypass this?

I thought perhaps extracting illegal characters from the search string before redirect, but the allowed character set for CI is 'a-z 0-9~%.:_-', which i have no idea how to work with.

any help would be greatly appreciated!