Redactor and html special characters

I just set up Redactor wysiwyg. Trying to get autosave working. I have a blank textarea.

<textarea id='editor1'></textarea>

Then I have the follow javascript re: Redactor documentation

$('#editor1').redactor({
    autosave: "save.php",
    autosaveInterval: 2, // seconds
    autosaveCallback: function(name, json)
    {
        console.log(json.message);
        console.log($('#editor1').redactor('code.get'));
    }
});

The save.php file just echos back the data, which is console logged as json.message. The data that gets sent with the autosave is encoded somehow, while the data that I get from just using code.get is not.

This is what gets console logged with a simple <p>hello</p>

%253Cp%253E%250A%2509hello%250A%253C%252Fp%253E

I have tried php htmlspecialchars_decode but no change, clearly I am missing something, help?