PHP API endpoint, transmitting value with jQuery.get(..) containing an ampersand (&)

Question

I have a simple PHP API endpoint. A possible request could look like this

api.php?v1=bob&v2=foo

Everything works fine, except when I try to transmit an URL as one of its values, which contains an ampersand:

url:      www.bob.com/?v3=bacon&v4=apples
request:  api.php?v1=www.bob.com/?v3=bacon&v4=apples&v2=foo

Now obviously this doesn't work, when I try to access v1 with $_GET["v1"] I get www.bob.com/?v3=bacon, the part &v4=apples is missing because $_GET thinks it's another parameter.

So I tried to encode the URL like so:

url = encodeURIComponent(url)

And transmitting it with jQuery to the endpoint with the following code:

$.get("api.php", { v1: url, v2: 'foo'}, function(data, status) {            
    ...
});

It still doesn't work.

I assume that jQuery builds the query string as expected and when it gets to the endpoint I got the same mess as before.

What am I missing? How can I solve this problem?