dave,
i know what entity encoding in HTML and XML is for. however, in the code piece you posted, it is handling a redirect, getting the location, and does the decode on provided value:
set location [translate_entities [string trim [lindex $meta [expr {$i+1}]]]]
The point is: location is an url and not supposed to be entity encoded, but url encoded. so i am still wondering, why it is doing it...