URL encoding special characters

i had a weird bug yesterday that consumed a bit of my time.
we have that we have an email that is sent to the user of one of our sites, with a link leading him back to his session (we add some key of the user to the link for that purpose). anyway.. we use a mail template.. a jsf page... all we need to do is to read that page (html generated for that jsf page) and replace some keywork with that parameter value
i had the link in the following format
http://server/servlet?target={user.key}
and i should replace that "{user.key}" with the actual value of the generated key.
this approach have been working fine for quite a while for that feature in several of our sites.
However, recently i was reported that the link was broken and leading to the error page.. as i investigated the matter i found that the link in the emails is
http://server/servlet?targetKKKKKK such that (KKKKKK is the key value)... the equal for some reason was missing.. pretty odd.

i checked the content of my template file.. the equal was there.. mmm..
after a lot of trials and debugging.. i was able to isolate the part where this problem was generated.
in reading the template we read it as an html resource on the web. not as a file. that's how to get the generated HTML and not the jsf code.

i tried http://server/templateURL.faces and voila... the problem was there..
for some reason the server dropped the equal character when generating the link. going little deeper i realized it is not the equal.. is it is the letter directly before the curly brace "{"... whatever u put there is being eliminated.

"Some systems can possibly modify these characters" that's was mentioned in some site describing a set of unsafe characters in URL encoding. maybe our system just decided to interpret the left curly brace as a back space..

my proposed solutions was either to use another stable character.. or to add another space and handle that when reading and parsing the template. (using "target=={" and when parsing the template i reverse it back if it is still there..)
it is a silly quick fix.. but it is the one that makes me backward compatible specially that i'm changing a code that is used by several of the sites.

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