I am using Infopath to collect rich text from a word document
and for some weird reason the output I get in the XML has the
special  character in it.
I understand that the UTF-8 encoding etcetra causes it to be
visible that way.
The first thing is to discover whether the XML is actually incorrect, or
whether it is simply being displayed incorrectly. To help you answer that
question, we need to know (a) what encoding is specified in the XML
declaration (assuming there is one), and (b) what the actual bytes (octets)
in the file are. You can find this out using a hex editor.
Michael Kay