Everything mentioned in Setting the Encoding applies when translating <-> XML messages with some special considerations. Chameleon currently supports the parsing of XML encoded in either UTF-8 and ASCII only. When parsing XML messages using one of the APIs, you can only set it to one of UTF-8 or ASCII.
Whenever a message is translated to XML in Chameleon version 4.0, a multibyte-encoded string is returned. In 3.X versions of Chameleon, characters in the extended character range (128-255) were escaped.