Ensuring valid XML element text

I have read about how to process XML and handle invalid text in element values; what I haven't been able to learn is: how do I ensure the text I _write_ as an XML element value is valid?

With VC++ 6.0, I'm reading text from an NTEXT database field and writing it with home-grown, text-based XML routines. (I'm not very familiar with DOM, but would be willing to work on it.)

Is there a way to pass the text thru some character encoding filter to ensure the ampersands (and all other special characters) get converted to & (and their corresponding &xxx; values) ?

Thanks for reading.

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Originally Posted by joleary

Is there a way to pass the text thru some character encoding filter to ensure the ampersands (and all other special characters) get converted to & (and their corresponding &xxx; values) ?

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Home based routines are nice as long as you are writting extremelly simple and well defined XML's. For the remaining 99% of cases : ) I would recommned using DOM or any other XML library. DOM ensures the XML text is valid and more.

Thanks for the quick reply PadexArt!

As my naive, home-grown XML writers are _everywhere_ in my system at the moment, can you point me to anything I can use in the meantime, even if I have to drop down (climb up?) into DOM do to a conversion on my string before I write it?

I couldn't tell really. If I had to solve this problem either I would change it with DOM or would make mu own functions using the boost library. They have some pretty usefull string libs.

Thank you again for your consideration, PadexArt.

I'll look into the boost libraries.

In the meantime, anyone else have any ideas?