[xml] XML Entities encoding question

[Fred <fred fredex gmail com>]

I have an app that emits XML as 8859-1 (or other encoding as needed), and the XML is sent to an Oracle database where the XML is unpacked and the contents used to update an existing schema.

I apparently fail to understand something about how char encodings work at the intersection of XML and Oracle.

If I send:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="WINDOWS-1252"?>
<MSG>
...
<LAST_NAME>BOLA<C3><C9>OS</LAST_NAME>
...

</MSG>

the two accented characters are each transformed into 0xBF. (with exactly the same result if it's 8859-1 instead of WINDOWS-1252.)

however, if I send:

<LAST_NAME>BOLA&#x00c3; &#x00c9;OS</LAST_NAME>

I get the desired result.

While I'm working on figuring out what I'm doing wrong regarding Oracle, is there some way I can force libxml2 to emit the second form rather than the first?

the tree is output using:
xmlDocDumpFormatMemoryEnc (doc, xmlbufptr, &xmlbufptr_size, "WINDOWS-1252", 1);

thanks!

Fred