Operating on XMLType containing & (Ampersands)

I was reading today Lewis post on How to Deal With Oracle XML and Ampersands ("&") in XML Documents. Personally I prefer different way. I use XMLElement function to generate XML documents. In my opinion this is more elegant way. The sample from Lewis post will look like that:

set define off
declare
  v_xml xmltype;
begin
  select xmlelement("ROWSET", 
           xmlelement("ROW", 
             xmlelement("COLA", 'lewis&me')))
    into v_xml 
    from dual;
end;
/

Disadvantage of this method is that you have to use SQL. But in most cases it's used while retrieving data from database, so it should not be a problem. Some time ago I was proposing to read document Mastering XML Generation in Oracle Database 10g Release 2. It is really good source of knowledge on XML manipulation inside Oracle database.
If you want to extract correctly ampersands and other special characters like < and > from XML document I suggest to read my post on differences between extract and extractvalue functions. If you want to manually convert &amp; to & you can use function dbms_xmlgen.convert with second parameter set to 1:

SQL> select dbms_xmlgen.convert('me&lewis', 1) from dual;

me&lewis

Cheers, Paweł