On 17/07/2011 21:56, Stephen D Green wrote:

Cross-posting, but yes it would be possible to do that
but mean handling all the weird and wonderful angle
bracket stuff ourselves in code

No, if you are taking strings from user data (and can ignore the possibility of control characters there) then the only thing you have to do is replace < by &lt's and & by &lt;, You don't need to parse anything. In a typical .net language you are talking about a line of code.

Inserting a string into XML without quoting the xml syntax characters <  and & (and it's safest to to > as well while you are there) is just generating errors that it is unreasonable to expect a parser later in the chain to fix. If you have an application generating syntax errors then surely it's better to fix the application than to expect every tool taht may consume the output of that application to somehow magically fix up the errors.

David