Please note that, as far as having "&" characters in an XML file, this is technically not supported according to the XML Specification, and a standards-compliant XML encoder should always escape "&" characters. Please refer to the following snippet from the XML Specification (<https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#syntax>):
"The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) must not appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively."
If you want to code the representation of some special characters, you can use the Unicode representation for it and use the "native2unicode" function.
