URL Multiple Query Parameters Encoded with HTML Entities

I came across a situation where a URL with multiple query parameters was encoded using htmlentities() and PHP was not recognizing the query parameters using $_GET. A common case for encoding urls using htmlentities() is to use them inside XML documents.

So a url with multiple query parameters, encoded using htmlentities() would look like this:
http://www.bradino.com/?color=white&size=medium&quantity=3

and when that url is accessed the second and third query parameters are not recognized because instead of separating the subsequent variables with an & that character gets converted into &. I could not find a good way to resolve this, so basically I just encoded the query string back to normal using html_entity_decode() and then slammed the parameters back into the $_GET array using parse_str().

There must be a better way! Anyone come across this before?