Rick,

Very well put!

JimB



>>>The problem is most likely that you are encoding the XML on the input end incorrectly. Garbage in, Garbage out <g>...
>>
>>Yes, this is coming from the client. They have entered it like that and we need to support it. However, using that approach, there is no way to read the original content as the returned value is interpreted. In order to get the original value, I would have to parse it myself.
>
>Well tell them they are posting invalid XML. XML is a standard and you have to follow the rules if you want to use XML effectively. If they provide you with bad data based on a baseline spec you echo that bad data back - it's string after all. I suspect after it comes back screwed up, they'll fix it <g>...
>
>You can read the raw text through the DOM with .innerText property, but seriously I wouldn't go down this path. The spec works a certain way for a reason to ensure that all values can be properly interpreted. If you use some sort of custom parsing on these strings you'll introduce other errors later on as you'll parse some other characters incorrectly.