Things work fine for other characters (a^, o^, etc) just not
w^. What is so special about this character ?
The fact that it's not in the iso-8859-1 subset of Unicode.
(iso-8859-1
is the "Western European" character repertoire, w^ is needed
only for
languages like Welsh and Irish Gaelic that are considered
too far West
to qualify...).
I set the http charset to UTF-8, and that fixed it.
Another technique is to use the ascii output encoding - this forces the
serialiser to output anything outside of the ascii range as a character
reference. For example, &_wcirc; would be output as the six ascii
characters &_#373; (without the underscores) which removes the encoding
issue.
The only problem with this method is that according to the spec the xml
declaration must be output for any output encoding other than UTF-8 or
UTF-16, even though ascii is subset. So if the result of the transform
is going form part of a larger document you will have deal with a
'spurious' xml declaration.
Cheers
andrew