Thanks however I should have explained that I am working with an XML file written by someone else. Therefore I do not have any control over the encoding that they want to use.
Comment on Re^2: XML File Encoding and Parsing Problem
Again, when they are outputting the octet in hex notation b0 under the encoding UTF-8 then this is illegal. b0 functions in ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 as degree sign, but not in UTF-8. In UTF-8 this is c2b0.
You can tell them if they are too stupid to do it correctly, they can use entities instead: ° works regardless of encoding.