>>Maybe you have to URLEncode your strings ... How did you create the test file?
>
>I am creating the file with the MSXML DOM object. The content is used directly from a memo field which contains some French characters. Could it be that there is an XML encoding that we have to use other than RTF-8 in order to benefit of that ability? In order to follow a pre-defined XML schema, I can't encode anything. It has to be sent as is.

Lauren Clarke & Paul Jordan just posted (I think yesterday) a routine over at the West-Wind site that can convert XML to the ISO8859 standard; that might be what you're looking for. Just search for: iso8859table.