Replacing utf-8 characters

[Mike]

In playing with this I found link.replace does work but when I use

link.replace('&','&')

it replaces it with & instead of just &.  link.replace is working 
for me since if I changed the second option from & to something else I 
see the change.

So it seems link.replace() function reads whether the first option is 
utf-8 and converts the second option automatically to utf-8?  How do I 
prevent that?

Thanks again.