Plus sign is not URL encoded correctly

I have a REST service that has a '+' character as part of the URI. It is a POST request and the '+' character is not getting encoded when it is passed to the service I am trying to test. So I thought I would disable encoding put the encoding in myself. The problem is that when I did that, soapUI took the encoded + (%2B) and turned it back into a plus before passing it to the service I was testing. Unfortunately I cannot test this particular test case.