It really depends on what kind of processing you are doing. Dealing with the unescaped characters is the safest approach but it requires dealing with charset issues, making sure the output is escaped properly.

Dealing with the escape text, in its native charset, is simpler. Character references can help because you don't need to worry about character sets for them; they are always Unicode. In fact, they are the safest way to get Unicode characters in a document with all the charset mangling that goes on.

In reply to Re^4: Converting HTML special entities to XML by iburrell
in thread Converting HTML special entities to XML by drhender

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