AJAX and HTML entities

Hi everyone! I'm trying to develop a new site with AJAX features. One of the features allows members to refresh the content of specific panels on the page. This all works well importing XHTML snippets using AJAX, but as soon as it includes any HTML entities like » the whole thing fails. It's returning the correct code (I tested it with an alert) but when I insert it into the div the HTML entities cause it to not display in Firefox and return a script error in IE. Anyone know how I can use HTML entities in my AJAX XML responses?

No joy with that one i'm afraid. Apparently it's to do with the fact that these HTML entities aren't declared within the scope of the XML i'm using to return my XHTML. When the parser sees the entities it throws a fit because it doesn't recognise them.

As these characters can have been input by members of my site, the only way I can think of is by creating a doctype for my XML files that includes all of the HTML entities from the W3C site, but I have no idea how to go about it!