I cannot deserialize non-ASCII characters in strings. The problem appears to be that the Xerces parser wrapper XercesHandler.cpp calls XMLString::transcode() which, under Windows, calls WideCharToMultiByte with argument CP_ACP, thus converting Unicode to ASCII rather then UTF-8.
Before trying to rebuild the library with a UTF-8 transcoder - a non-trivial exercise since the source of Xerces I have is for the latest version - I'd be grateful to hear if there is some simpler workaround (or if I'm barking up the wrong tree altogether). Thanks Tony Dodd Oxford University RTS
