Extended characters being decoded?

I'm using a data array to populate my grid. One of my columns contains hyperlinks to documents which may contain extended characters.

I encode the characters while building the array and can see when viewing the source that é has been encoded to %E9.

When I click on the hyperlink though, my document is not found and the URL shows é instead of the %E9.

The column is defined as AW.Formats.HTML. Are my encoded characters being unencoded somewhere within the AW code and is there a way to prevent this?

Thanks.

The AW.Formats.HTML class passes the source data to text without transformation -

obj.dataToText = function(data){
return data;
};

I don't think this has something to do with AW. Check the page DOM in Firebug or IE8 DOM inspector.