stupid NS won't pass white spaces

Argh here we go again.

I've already tried the two solutions posted at qid=20217126.  They worked before, but they don't work today.

I have HREFs, form submission, and javascript <select> redirection all using the same format:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/cgi/script.cgi?apl::Apple Recipes>Apple Recipes</a>

Then my perl script delimits the query:

$page=$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
$page=~s/^page=//;

foreach($page){
  ($shortname,$longname)=split(/::/,$_);
  }

Without fail, NS drops the second part of $longname, and prints only Apple.

Like I said, this was once resolved in qid=20217126 and today I tried both of those solutions. Neither one is working now.

Can you please help me? Thank you thank you thank you.

PS- the solutions offered at 20217126 are:

(1) $company =~ s/ /%20/g;

and

(2)
$company=&my_escape($company);
...

sub my_escape{
 my($text)=@_;
 # Build a char->hex map
 for (0..255) {
   $escapes{chr($_)} = sprintf("%%%02X", $_);
 }
 ##  Regular expression for escaping special chars.
 $text =~ s/([^;\/?:@&=+\$,A-Za-z0-9\-_.!~*'()])/$escapes{$1}/g;

 return $text;
}