One way is to wrap your string into CDATA tag. Other is to use pre-defined entity references in XML

&lt; 	< 	less than
&gt; 	> 	greater than
&amp; 	& 	ampersand 
&apos; 	' 	apostrophe
&quot; 	" 	quotation mark

>Thanks, Sergei. Can you direct me to some documentation on how to preserve those illegal characters?
>
>>There are ways to represent illegal characters in XML. If you don't care about preserving them, use CHRTRAN
>>

>>lcIllegalCharacters = "..."
>>lcReplacemets = REPLICATE("*", LEN(lcIllegalCharacters)) 
>>... CHRTRAN(cField, lcIllegalCharacters, lcReplacemets)
>>