I am trying to create an automatic feed generation for data to be sent to Google Base using utf-8 encoding. However I am getting errors whenever hyphens are found telling me that there is an encoding error in the relevant attribute (title, description, product_type). I am currently using: &amp;minus; but I have also tried: &amp;#8722; neither of which have worked. I am using the following declaration at the top of the document: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> Any help appreciated and let me know if I need to give more information!