XMLROOT encoding chr ref = hex ref

Question

We use xmlroot to create an XML file for our archival system directly from SQL.
The xml works fine but we have some "encoding" problem.
Our problem is the special character are in chr ref (html) format instead of hexadecimal ones.
for exemple: & will be written as & in our xml file. We would like it to be in hexadecimal instead:
& [source: http://myhandbook.info/codes_htmlchr.html]
To create our xml file we put the version as follow "VERSION '1.0" encoding="UTF-8' ".
Is there a way we can make it write the special characters directly in hexadecimal format ?
Thanks in advance !
Pier-Olivier

Answer 1

Not sure how you make them hexidecimal.  What's the problem with them being the html version?
How are you setting the XML to be UTF-8?  as the XMLROOT doesn't let you specify it (or it didn't in 10g when I last had to do that; have they changed it in 11g?) unless you fake the 'version' element to include it.
Here's an example of the method we have used to generate XML in UTF-8 format in the file...
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  declare
  2    v_xml xmltype;
  3    v_doc XMLDOM.DOMDocument;
  4  begin
  5    select xmlelement("AllDepartments",
  6             xmlagg(
  7               xmlelement("Department", xmlattributes(d.deptno as deptno, d.dname as dname),
  8                 xmlagg(
  9                   xmlelement("Employee", xmlattributes(e.empno as empno, e.mgr as mgr),
10                     xmlelement("ename", ename),
11                     xmlelement("job", job),
12                     xmlelement("sal", sal)
13                             )
14                       )
15                         )
16                   )
17                     )
18    into   v_xml
19    from   dept d left outer join emp e on (e.deptno = d.deptno)
20    group by d.deptno, d.dname;
21    v_doc := DBMS_XMLDOM.NEWDOMDOCUMENT(v_xml);
22    DBMS_XMLDOM.WRITETOFILE(v_doc, 'TEMP_DIR\emp.xml', 'UTF-8');
23    DBMS_XMLDOM.FREEDOCUMENT(v_doc);
24* end;
SQL> /