how to disable/control mod_perl SSI arg encoding

[S Page]

Hey folks, my first post.

I'm writing an Apache SSI as a mod_perl module.  Apache 1.3.4 / mod_perl
1.18.
When Web designers pass it HTML character entities, by the time they
arrive at my module some become 8-bit characters.

For example,
<!--#perl sub="Macromedia::BuildNav::code" args="
        header_text=Gen&eacute;rat&ocirc;r reviews and Oscar&reg; awards
        product_color=#FFCC33
"-->

If I `print STDERR` or `$r->print` out args, it contains
header_text=Gen \351 erat \364 r reviews and Oscar&reg; awards.  The
accented characters are encoded as 0xe9 0xf4.

*   What Apache/mod_perl code is doing the entity decoding?
*   What character encoding is it using?   It looks like ISO-8859-1.
*   Is there a way to disable this or control it myself?

Thanks, and many many thanks for all the code and the commentary.
--
=S Page,   Macromedia Web engineer
  "Information is deeper than reality" 
  http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980314/features1.html