I’m not sure what you are asking.
When in an XML file the & must be a & or it must be in a CDATA or processing instruction or Comment section [1], otherwise you don’t have XML. Whoever creates the XML should create legal XML. For instance, if you use IS 4.6 pub.web:recordToDocument to create the XML and there are & in the data, you should set the encode parameter to true.
Whoever takes data out of XML should unencode or allow the application to un-encode it. For instance, if you use IS 4.6 pub.web:queryDocument to get text from a parsed XML document, the text will be decoded before being put into the pipeline.
HTH,
Fred
[1] [url=“Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)”]Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition)