When Codeigniter gets variables from the URL, it returns the variables in HTML friendly characters. I couldn’t figure out why my left and right brackets were acting up. So what you need to do is just use a simple php string replace function and replace the special characters you need.
$string = str_replace("(", "(", $string)
$string = str_replace(")", ")", $string);
This will just just switch back the left and right brackets into special characters agai