in reply to Converting utf8 characters to named and numeric entities

Note that the only characters you need to escape in XML are <>& and in attributes also ".

The rest of the permissible Unicode codepoints can simply be written in the document's character encoding, provided you specify the encoding in the <?xml?> header like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

(Or if you leave it blank, the XML standard says it must be UTF-8, but sometimes you can find tools that don't adhere to that standard).