HTML entities in [[...]] links

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature:

[[http://www.no.place A–Z]] turns the & into & instead of turning 
– into en dash. I found this when trying to make a link to a site in 
Maori -- I have created ā ... ū entity references that translate 
into the corresponding Unicode characters for long vowel sounds.

Any ideas how to fix this? I will have a look at the code tonight and see what 
I can come up with.
-- 
John Rankin