Removing url encoding from XML POST requests

[Eric]

Hi,
I was sure I would be able to find some info about this in the archives but 
I have had no luck.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
push @{ $ua->requests_redirectable }, 'POST';
my $utf_account_header = encode("utf8", $account_header);
my $req = POST $self->{posturl},[$utf_account_header];
$req->header('Content-Type' => 'text/xml; charset=UTF-8');
my $res = $ua->request($req);
I am not sure if the utf encoding is nessicary, but from what I read in the 
HTTP::Request manpage it is. "Note that the content should be a string of 
bytes.  Strings in perl
      can contain characters outside the range of a byte.  The Encode
      module can be used to turn such strings into a string of bytes."

But where I want to send,
<PAYZIP_XML>
  <REQUEST>
I get
User-Agent: libwww-perl/5.79
Content-Length: 728
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
%3CPAYZIP_XML%3E%0A++%3CREQUEST%3E%0A++++
(I cut out some bad to post info)

I know for certain the server does not expect to get url encoding, I don't 
know why the hell they could not have just decided to check for it though! 
:) I tested that using the POST script and was able to get a correct 
response with it.

So can someone tell me how to specify that I am sending the exact content I 
want to send and not to encode it?

Thanks,
Eric