Get term by name using unsanitized name value

What i'm trying to do is to programatically set woocommerce product category.

What I have is the term name test & sample and the post id 9, so to set the products category I have used get_term_by and wp_set_object_terms

$name  = 'test & sample';
$posid = 9;
//get the term based on name
$term = get_term_by('name', $name, 'product_cat');
//set woocommerce product category
wp_set_object_terms($posid, $term->term_id, 'product_cat');

As you can see my problem is the unsanitized value of $name. What I have done so far is replace & with & which work.

$name = str_replace('&', '&', 'test & sample');
$posid = 9;
//get the term based on name
$term = get_term_by('name', $name, 'product_cat');
//set woocommerce product category
wp_set_object_terms($posid, $term->term_id, 'product_cat');

My question is how to Get term by name using unsanitized name value or how to sanitize the name value to get the term id properly.

via Chebli Mohamed