Encoding html entities in url string

Question

I'm trying to prepare a url that has special characters in it, to be used as GET variables in a php file. I think I need html entities and urlencode, which I then need to decode in the other php file. But I'm running into some problems with correctly encoding them. This is what I have:

<?php $title = "This is a ‘simple’ test"; ?>
<?php $titleent = htmlentities($title); ?>
<?php $titleentencoded = urlencode($titleent); ?>
<?php $date = '21-12-2011'; ?>

    <p>Title: <?php echo $title; ?></p>
    <p>Title html entities: <?php echo $titleent; ?></p>
    <p>Title encoded: <?php echo $titleencoded; ?></p>

    <p><a href="index.php?title=<?php echo $titleencoded; ?>&date=<?php echo $date; ?>">Go!</a></p>

The $titleencoded variable turns out to be empty. I'm overlooking something obvious but I can't see it. What am I doing wrong?

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EDIT: New code after suggestions

Okay, so here's what I came up with:

<?php $title = "This is a ‘simple’ test"; ?>
<?php $titleentencoded = urlencode($title); ?>
<?php $htmlent = htmlentities($titleentencoded); ?> 
<?php $date = '21-12-2011'; ?>

<p>Title: <?php echo $title; ?></p>
<p>Title encoded: <?php echo $titleentencoded; ?></p>
<p>Title html entities: <?php echo $htmlent; ?></p>

<p><a href="index.php?title=<?php echo $htmlent; ?>&date=<?php echo $date; ?>">Go!</a></p>

Is this the right way?

Answer 1

Your variable is empty because you have a typo. You initialize $titleentencoded but later use $titleencoded :

<?php $titleentencoded = urlencode($titleent); ?>

// Should be
<?php $titleencoded = urlencode($titleent); ?>

See @Quentin's answer for a logic error.

Answer 2

You are doing it backwards.

You are putting data in a URL, then a URL in an HTML document.

You need to urlencode the data, put it in the URL then htmlencode the URL and put it in the document.