How to get and encoded character to stay encoded?

[simmy7]

I am trying to replace a series of characters with an encoded string value and use that to look for a value in a table. My problem is that when I put the encoded value in the replace, cf converts it to the character instead of leaving it as those characters.

Example
Let say Passname = "%E2%84%A2Hello"
I have the code:
<cfset PassName=#Replace(PassName, "%E2%84%A2", "&##153;","all")#>
this will make the string passname contain: "™Hello". I want it to be "&#153;Hello"

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks
Simmy