Textformat tabstops and bullets in xml file

According to the search there’s never been a post that contains the word “tabstops” in the history of kirupa.com. I am honored to be the FIRST!

Anyway, I am converting an application so that text content that was once trapped in the authoring environment will now reside in an external XML file.

The problem i’m running into is that my “textformat tabstops” tags and bullets no longer work.

In the content I had:


<textformat tabstops='[10]'><br><br><b><u>Blah blah blah</u></b><br>	• Blah blah blah<br>	• Blah blah blah etc.</textformat>

This worked as expected when it was internal (not in XML file)

Then I moved it to the XML file within CDATA tags. Underlines and Italic tags work fine, but not my tabstops or bullets.

The resultant erroneous text looks kinda like this (not shown here are the little squares that replace my bullets):


[U]**Blah blah blah**[/U]
	 Blah blah blah
	 Blah blah blah etc.

I saw on an online document from Adobe that someone used unescape() to fix the tabstops, but I couldn’t get it to work. For the bullets I tried the HTML special entity code **• **but had no luck.

Anyone have a solution for this? Thanks in advance.