How can I encode reserved XML characters in actionscript?

Question

I am writing a business app in Flex that uses web services to communicate with a middle tier. The web services accept and return messages in XML format. In many cases, I need to be able to allow the user to type something like the following into a field in the app, which in turn will be added as an element in an XML payload bound for a SOAP web service (without the quotes):

"account balance < 1000"

The Flex parser chokes when trying to serialize an element with this in the Text node (eg, account balance < 1000. So I need some way to encode the "<" to "<" prior to doing the XML serialization. In addition, I would prefer a generic way to do this, such as with an attribute on the service declaration, since I have over 40 services that must support this kind of input. Any ideas?

Answer 1

use the escape and unescape functions.

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/action_scripts/actionscript_dictionary/actionscript_dictionary199.html