Trouble replacing an ampersand ( & ) in PHP with str_replace – Solution

Now this took about a half an hour until I figured this out. Posting this, just in case someone finds it – I hope I save you 30 minutes.
I fetched a link from HTML content with preg_match(), and I had to replace some data in that link.

str_replace("upgrade-plugin&plugin",'update-selected&plugins', $updateItem);

For some reason – the ampersand ( & ) wasn’t found and so the string wasn’t replacing it. At the end I figured it’s the ampersand problem, and here is the fix (sometimes the simplest things…)

str_replace("upgrade-plugin&plugin",'update-selected&plugins', $updateItem);

Update:
I had to use this method, because the ampersand was extracted from HTML document with preg_match. To avoid issues like this – use

html_entity_decode()