Handling Forbidden XML Characters with SQL Server

Slava Murygin shows how we can use Unicode characters to make XML appear to display special characters:

That is very known issue that SQL Server’s XML does not accept characters “&”, “<” and “>”.
There are two more forbidden XML characters ” ‘ ” and ” ” ” (single and double quotes), but SQL Server mostly accept them.

The common solution is to replace these characters by their codes.
Would say we have a silly sentence: “Anne & Robin collect > “berries” than Jane & Kevin, but < than Ivan & Lucy.”

Slava’s post is specifically geared toward wanting to view the characters as-is, not store them for later display. I’m not sure how often that comes up, but it’s a valid use case.