The &foo; syntax has special meaning in XML. However, unlike HTML, XML does NOT predefine a bunch of named enties. So, if the entity has not been declared first, the XML parser won't know what it is. The only exceptions to these entities are > < & " ' and those in the form of 
 etc.

If you want to preserve the entity verbatim, you probably want to do this:

$xml =~ s/&(?!gt;|lt;|amp;|quot;|apos;|#x\d+;)/&/g;

[download]

Basically, you are properly escaping all of the & that should not be in the XML. So &simple; would become &simple; (boy this is hard to type in HTML).

Sorry, the code is untested, but should work ;-)

Update: Added the ; in the regex to make it a little more correct.

Ted Young

($$<<$$=>$$<=>$$<=$$>>$$) always returns 1. :-)

In reply to Re: Simply Choking by TedYoung
in thread XML::Simple and problem characters by Grundle

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