custom bbcode / how to stop conversion to htmlentities

[sde]

some <b>custom</b> text i want to parse

by the time this hits my handle_bbcode_test() function, the HTML characters are converted. i.e. < is converted to &lt;

i do not want it to do that. i need to preserve the HTML characters in their original form so i can do my own formatting.

i want it to work similar to the code tags except i notice that even in the code tags the HTML is converted by the time it reaches the handler.

here's my [test] declaration
//[TEST]
$tag_list['no_option']['test'] = array(
'callback' => 'handle_bbcode_test',
'strip_empty' => true,
'disable_smilies' => true,
'disable_wordwrap' => true,
'strip_space_after' => 2
);

any insight would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

[sde]

bump ... anyone?