entity reference help, please!

[Mark Sizer <mr...@cybercrop.com>]

I've spent all day trying to find out how to replace characters with entity
references and have had no luck. I don't even want to use custom entity
references, just &amp, &lt, and &gt so the parser won't choke reading what
I'm outputting.
 
One would think that the Text node setText/getText methods would take care
of it (or at least throw an exception if you give it characters that will
break the parser), but it doesn't.
 
How do I convert a Java String from raw characters to an XML-safe
representation?
 
Thanks for any help,

Mark R. Sizer, 
CyberCrop.com 

P.S. Is this as easy as I think it should be and I'm just really stupid
today? Meanwhile, I'm going to write the code myself.