note Hero Zzyzzx <p>Those "special characters" are the nature of Base 64 encoding, use md5_hex instead.</p> <p>From the docs:</p> <pre> md5_hex($data,...) Same as md5(), but will return the digest in hexadecimal form. The length of the returned string will be 32 and it will only contain characters from this set: '0'..'9' and 'a'..'f'. </pre> <p>But chances are how you're comparing the digested strings is wrong because a forward slash shouldn't break it. . . Let me guess- you're doing the comparison with DBI, but you're not using placeholders?</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-59531"> <p align="right"><font size=1 face="Verdana, San Serif"><b> -Any sufficiently advanced technology is<br> indistinguishable from doubletalk.</b></font></p> <p align="right"><font size=1 face="Verdana, San Serif"><a href="http://www.geekuprising.com">My Biz</a></font></p> </div></div> 459637 459637