xmlextract supports the ncr option:
ncr = {non_ascii|non_server|no}
At runtime, the ncr option is applied if:
The result datatype is a string or Unicode datatype, not numeric or datetime or money, for instance.
The XPath query does not specify text().
The default ncr option is:
If the returns datatype is a Unicode datatype, the default value is ncr=no.
If the returns datatype is a string datatype, the default value is ncr=non_server.
