Perl autoconverts the '&' character to '\u0026' in a JSON link

Question

Using the LWP library, I receive JSON data, where the link looks like:

param1=&param2=&param3=

When you pull out the value of the link along the way, for some reason pearl replaces the & symbol with \u0026. What to do?

I tried to remove characters by replacing them with regular expressions, but the %5c' character still appears.