help writing special characters

[hbarakat]

Hi there,

does anyone know why doing the following

 <outout:apply-templates select="root/{&#123;&#36;idName;&#125}" />
would cause this exception:
javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException: Illegal decimal
character reference.

What I was expecting was the following line to be output:
<outout:apply-templates select="root/{$idName}"/>

I also tried adding a semicolon after &#125 and that didn't cause an
exception but gave:
<outout:apply-templates select="root/{$idName;}"/>

I don't want to have the extra semicolon after idName. (is this a bug?)

any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Hanaa Barakat