I'm currently working on a content management system that allows users to enter text that is stored in XML files. Everything worked great until a Spanish speaking user tried it.

I stole this snippet from the Perl-XML FAQ at http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/

$str =~ s/([^\x0A-\x7F])/'&#' . ord($1) . ';'/gse;
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Run your data through this before sending it to the parser and things might work better...