Thought I'd mention that the preferred approach to this in other software systems seems to be to map the illegal characters to/from the Unicode Private Use Area. So illegal XML character 11 0xB becomes codepoint 0xE00B. Apparently this approach is used by some pieces of commercial software, notably Microsoft Visio. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa218415%28v=office.10%29.asp... ...mikeb -- Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL WG Co-Chair Tel: 781-330-0412