Loadvars and the "&" Delimiter

I have a picture gallery that gets its data from a text file using the loadvars object. Currently, I have a text file with 2 different variables, one is the picture location URL and the other is a description of the picture. These variables, as per flash standards, are separated in the text file by the & delimeter. My client now wants to change the URL to be dynamic meaning the URL will have the ampersand (&) character in it. The loadvars object will now split the dynamic URL thinking it has hit the end of the variable. Does anyone have a work around for this? Is there a way to change th delimiter in flash? Is there a piece of code that does a text string search and change that maybe I can change all of the & in the URL to ~ and change it back to & once it is in flash?