XML parsing trouble with & (aka ampersand, &)
I have been working with XML parsing recently using the StAX (why use StAX?). However, I ran into an issue with the & (ampersand) since it is a reserved character in xml and needs to be escaped. But when the & was escaped the parser would fire multiple events, 1) text before the &, 2) the &, 3) text after the &. This was a bit hard to integrate with, so instead of putting a & in the xml file I just replaced it with a different character and did a search and replace once the data was parsed. This strategy saved me quite a bit of work.
