>I think I am looking at the problem in the wrong place. I compared the XML output when run from the IDE and from the executable. I noticed at least 5 Russian characters that were not transformed to the corresponding numerical code (&#nnnn) when run from the executable. This was the issue I was trying to solve by transforming international characters to their equivalent numerical codes.
>
>One such character is г which is stored as 'ã' and has the numerical code of '& # 1 0 7 5 ;' (minus the spaces).
>
>The real question is: Why is it that when I run the program interactively, the data is transformed properly whereas when I run it through a compile exe; it cannot transform at least 5 characters properly?

Few things to check - cpcurr(), cpcompile(). Any string literal in code is interpreted under the codepage used when the code was compiled.

You may need to use strconv() and cpconvert() with specific codepage (or was it locale code?) until you get proper results - one for Russian, one for whatever the other language was.

I got this to return the proper UTF-8 double byte for ф:

STRCONV(STRCONV("ô",1),9,1251,1)

but then I wouldn't know how to get the entity number from that.