+ being replaced with a space when passed in to browser control

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I am currently trying to pass the contact phone number into a browser control but if the number is in international format (example: +61xxxxxxxxx) then the + gets decoded as a space. Now it seems that there is some URL encoding/decoding going on for special characters as other characters will come through fine however the + symbol is not being encoded before passing and is therefore being decoded on the other end as a space (which I know makes sense since + is a valid encoding for a space in some situations). I would expect however that the encoding that