HTTP Data Being Changed

dlwester has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am calling a remote Perl service from a Perl script with the following code:

my $userAgent = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $request = HTTP::Request->new();
$request->uri($buildManagerUrl);
$request->method("POST");
my $postData = "action=$action\&params=$callParamsJson";
my $content = encode("iso-8859-1", $postData);
$request->content($content);
$request->content_type("application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
my $response = $userAgent->request($request);
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When I print out the request data, one of the fields in the embedded XML in the content is:

<password>XUvN+5R3</password>
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Here's the code that retrieves the data sent above:

my $q = new CGI();
my %params = $q->Vars();
print Dumper($q);
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However, when I look at the request in the Dumper output, the '+' in the data is being replaced by a space:

<password>XUvN 5R3</password>
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I'm guessing I'm probably just using the wrong encoding, but I have no idea how to resolve this. Any ideas?

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