XSLT throws some unicode errors!!

Hi,

I'm getting the following error while compiling the my xslt files.

"XSLT Error (javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException): An invalid 
XML character (Unicode: 0xa8) was found in the element content of the document."


I'm using the syntax, "java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -in index.xml -xsl 
standard.xslt" to compile my xslt file.


I ASSUMED that the problem could be the presence of a "?" in the html output 
which is 
present in my "standard.xslt" file.. 


<A target="_top"
      href="http://oraclestore.oracle.com/cec/cstage?eccookie=&amp;ecaction=
ecpassthru2&amp;template=walkin1.en.htm">

Please note the ? in the url.

I have tried various options to replace this question mark, but none seemed 
to be working. 

The last option which I tried is, put the following entity definition in the 
standard.xslt file.:

<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet[
<!ENTITY qstn "&#63;">
]>


(&#63; = unicode equivalent of "?")

and put the "encoding="utf-8" reference within the following stylesheet 
definition:-

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output
          method="html"
          indent="yes"
          encoding="utf-8"

and refer the url as follows, replacing "?" with &qstn;

<A target="_top"
      href="{$ORHREF}/products/index.html&qstn;content.html">

Still, I'm getting the following error message:

"XSLT Error (javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException): An invalid 
XML character (Unicode: 0xa8) was found in the element content of the document."


My DTD reference in the XSLT file is as follows....

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output
          method="html"
          indent="yes"
          encoding="utf-8"
  doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
  doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"

/>


 Any idea to solve this problem?. or is there any other bug  which is 
giving this error? I have been really stuck up with this error(-:.....


regards
Unni


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