white spaces in $_POST - php

Question

I have a HTML dropdown list populated by PHP as following:
<form name="selectOccupation" method="post" action="specific_occupation.php">
<div align="centre">
<select name="occupation_dropdown" id="occupation_dropdown">
<?php
include "connection.php";
$sql = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT Occupation from patient_info");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)) {
echo "<option value=".$row['Occupation'].">".$row['Occupation']."</option>";
}
?>
</select>
</div>
<br>
<br>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Proceed"/>
</form>
In the specific_occupation.php file, I have this code:
<?php
include "connection.php";
$selectedoccupation = $_POST['occupation_dropdown'];
echo $selectedoccupation;
$myquery = "SELECT patient_info.Name, test_info.DateOfTest FROM `patient_info`,`test_info` WHERE patient_info.PatientID = test_info.PatientID AND patient_info.Occupation = '$selectedoccupation' ";
$query = mysql_query($myquery);
if ( ! $query ) {
echo mysql_error();
die;
}
$data = array();
for ($x = 0; $x < mysql_num_rows($query); $x++) {
$data[] = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);
}
$tempdata = json_encode($data);
?>
This works fine if an occupation without any white space between them like "carpenter" is selected from the dropdown menu but doesn't work for "sales person". How can the $_POST be used for occupations with white spaces??
Thanks in advance !!

Answer 1

You're building your HTML wrong. You've got it as:
<option value=Sales Person>
^^^^^---what will get sent as the value
^^^^^^---some wonky unknown/non-standard attribute
This is incorrect. HTML now requires that ALL attributes be quoted:
<option value="Sales Person">
and even when the quotes weren't required, you still had to have the quotes to handle "spaced" data like this.

Answer 2

PHP post replace some characters such as - with whitespaces.
You can try urlencode($var) in your PHP script.