Google base feed character problem

Hello all,

I have set up a google base feed and am having difficulty getting the products to upload without errors. The errors are caused by characters such as ä.

I understand that in xml I need to declare the use of these and that the descriptions I have which use these characters do not declare them (it's just a html description). Hence the error.

I am gradually going through and removing the offending characters, however is there a way around this? Is there a module that I can get that doesn't have this problem?