Apologies, Tanktalus, about the literal interpretation issue .... the reason I've pursued this item is that I've got this very, very lightweight script that only needs the raw QUERY_STRING info to do it's thing (no parsing of values, etc.), and the only hitch is that the info being passed needs to include the # character. Firing up CGI to deal with this one item is making me feel resource greedy.
I guess I'll stick with including the few lines that substitute "#" for an alternate character passed in the Q_S.
Appears I'm at the point of beating a dead horse .... just thought there might be some way to do the deed with even less code or resources.