Getting Unicode HREFs

Hi all, I'm struggling with a problem of how to get an %-encoded Unicode URL
from a DHTML anchor into a script variable but maintaining the encoding.

See this example code. I've used { } instead of angle brackets to avoid this
mail getting mangled by your viewer:

{A id=x href=ftp:%E3%82%B9}hi{/A}
{script}
alert(x.outerHTML);
alert(x.href);
{/script}

The alert for outerHTML shows the href still has % codes in it, but the
alert for href doesn't, it shows odd characters. I'd like just the href
part, but with the % codes in place.

I've experimented with using 'escape', 'encodedURI' and
'encodedURIComponent' but they all change other things too, I want the
originally encoded URL without any other characters such as spaces
additionally encoded.

It doesn't seem so much to ask, can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
DaveW