Hi I made a patch to remedy two of the present bugs: 1) Escape <, & and > characters in toxml() 2) abort the transaction if parsing fails 1) uses the escape method from xml-sigs xml.utils, but this dependency can be removed. (not done now) I was wondering about encodings the other day (subject: XMLDocument shortcomings). If you have comments on how to introduce intelligent encoding/decoding please share it with me. Gabor