jQuery Ajax and Passing Data

I was having an issue the other day with passing an ampersand into a script via jQuery Ajax. 

I was doing this: data:"category="+category+"&groupname="+groupname, If the groupname had an ampersand in it the variable was getting cut off. After do some research on the issue I found a better way to pass in data. This improved way of passing in the data automatically url encodes the data to be passed in properly.