Encode & symbol in XML

Question

My Perl program is processing an XML file. Some entries may contain & symbols. And the parser breaks, saying: "Invalid name in entity".

How can I process the file and encode &-s in all the incorrect entities?

So, it will be something like this:

<words>text1 & text2</words>  -->  <words>text1 &amp; text2</words>

Answer 1

It's not an XML file. If it were XML, the & would be written as &. Processing non-XML files is difficult because you can't use an XML parser. It's best to fix the program that created this file, changing it to produce proper well-formed XML.