When the string in a field has unusual characters - for example Unicode 0x14 - the XML generated will be malformed & will result in a parseException with any browser set up to handle XML. For instance, Apache Derby issue 246 http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-246?decorator=none&view=rss results in the following display: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-246?decorator=none&view=rss Line Number 269, Column 102: when viewed using Mozilla (1.7.1) Also, trying to parse this with a SAX parser results in this: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x14) was found in the CDATA section. at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source) at javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser.parse(SAXParser.java:345)