Chad,



At 02:21 PM 7/3/2006, you wrote:
Unfortunately, the vendor still requires that these characters be
substituted with their proper entity symbols. That being said, is
there an easier way to substitute those characters other than
manually or using a find/change routine to do so?

To address a similar requirement, I am shortly going to be 
experimenting with facilities in XSLT 2.0 that allow serialization of 
output using a new feature, character maps.



 Also, the one issue
that I am running into is the fact that if I try to put an entity
symbol into the file such as &test; when I process the file, it
converts it to &test;. It's like it won't allow me to use the &
symbol even when using it in the name of the entity. Whew, I'm tired!

What are you using to edit your files? Either you need to switch a 
feature off in your editor (the feature that auto-escapes markup 
characters for you), or switch tools altogether. You can switch back 
when you're done.



One of the great unsung features of XML is that you can use the tool 
that's right for the job. It's unsung since the vendors do most of 
the singing, but they're not going to sing about how easy it is to 
use someone else's product on your data -- even though that's much of 
the point of XML, and most experienced practitioners rely on it as a 
matter of course.



Off to character maps --



Regards,
Wendell