file_get_contents and characters in a URL problem

I use the file_get_contents function to get the html from a page. I parse through that page and get a specific url I want. It looks similar to this:

http://www.domain.com/index.cfm?action=blah&ID=5000

Now I want to file_get_contents the above url. I understand that the & is for html so I tried to convert the string to work as a url. I tryed both using urlencode function on the query of this url and just manually through php replacing with what I thought were the appropriate characters with no luck. Can anyone help, or point me in the right direction?

Is it returning an empty string? How are you getting that URL which already has the & in it?

& is the HTML equivalent of &. So why not convert & to &? Just a thought ;)

html_entity_decode