Elements that contain data of type xs:string may need to be escaped to prevent the xml parser from getting confused. How best to do this depends on the encoding of the string.

== ASCII ==

If the string is guaranteed to only contain characters from the ASCII character set then it needs to be escaped only if it contains the characters <, & or > (> is normally OK except under confusing circumstances so it's probably best to escape it anyway). A CDATA declaration has the form:

{{{
<![CDATA[some_string_goes_here]]>
}}}

This will escape any ASCII string except for ones that contain the substring ]]> since this would otherwise be the close delimiter. To escape such strings one can perform a global search and replace:

{{{
s/]]>/]]]]><![CDATA[>/g
}}}

Which splits the substring between two CDATA tags, thus allowing it to be escaped. CDATA elements get ignored by conforming XML parsers so such a string transformation won't effect what gets read in by the parser.

== Unicode ==

Unfortunately Unicode is more complicated to handle. If we need to deal with this we might want to consider using an external library.