There is a vanishingly small chance that the data contain ']]>'. In fact, this could be an issue, but I have only been working here for two days and I am sure that the first answer I get will be that it is so unlikely that it is considered impossible. But this data has a high sorrow factor if it is not handled correctly, so I will eventually bring that up.

I think that base 64 encoding is out of the question as it would be too slow.

In practical terms, getting the binary data wrapped in '<![CDATA...]>' is probably the best option. Maybe for now, I can do that myself in preprocessing and get some traction on parsing these that way.

Thank you.

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