HTML Character Identities in Twitter

Question

I'm developing a twitter app, and when I submit a new tweet from php with abrahams twitteroauth and with any special character it submits it to twitter as the HTML identity. I've tried all the html_entity_decode() and the htmlspecialchars_decode() but nothings working. Thank you :)

edit: heres some code as by request (after logging in with oauth [which I know works] I'm doing this to submit the tweet)

$status = $_POST['status']; $to->post('statuses/update', array('status' => html_entity_decode(stripslashes($status))));