Special characters in XML (UTF8, escapes etc)

This may seem like a simple problem, but I'm kind of a slow learner, so any help would be appreciated.
I'm generating XML output via ordinary PL/SQL procedures i.e. not using the Oracle XSQL stuff. The data is built up into a XML document, which will be parsed within the server, then passed out to a client, probably as a CLOB.
The data may contain "special" characters such as "<&>" and so on. Is there an existing function to translate these into an "XML-safe" form within the text, or do I need to trap and translate them individually?
Also, the database may contain foreign characters e.g. Thai or Chinese. Will this be handled transparently by my XML-extraction stuff - which just selects the data from the tables and writes it to a CLOB inside XML tags - or do I have to do something to make sure the XML comes out in a safe UTF format?
Thanks,
Chris

use & instead of &
see http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#syntax

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Is there any way to replace the xml codes to special characters inside an entire xml document/ for a text in element.
I want to get the xml codes to get replaced to respective special character(for any special character)
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<Details>Advance is applicable only for < 1000. This is mentioned in Seller's document</Details>
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So, just to be sure I understand correctly, you want this :
<Details>Advance is applicable only for < 1000. This is mentioned in Seller's document</Details>
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BEGIN
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Edited by: 950814 on 30 Aug, 2012 7:48 PM

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Message was edited by: 996913
This issue is observed only while running the code in server, not from Jdev.
When we append the additional tags without new line character, "\n", there are no extra characters being added. Also, in other case also. where we used "Marshaller" to prepare the XML, we have seen this issue.
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Thanks,

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===================
RDF:
=====
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>
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Oracle DB 11G
Weblogic
Apex 4.2.2
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Regd: Handling of special characters in XML

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My problem is there may be some special characters in the input IDOC. when ever these special characters come my java mapping is not able to Parse the IDOC.
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Java has some characters reserved which is normally used to declare the Entity Name. To handle such kind of situations, you can replace these characters with these special characters, which get substituted automatically while parsing the XML file.
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Edited by: Anurag Gargh on Aug 11, 2009 3:41 PM

Special characters in XML (UTF8, escapes etc)

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