> Before I give myself a headache trying to figure it out, I 
> was wondering if anyone could suggest a better approach I 
> should look into.

I would suggest outputting valid XML, and then post-processing it with
non-XML software (e.g. sed/Perl) to generate non-XML output.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay