Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hello,
I'm saving an onbject to a xml file using JDOM but the problem I have is that I would like to save also the leading/trailing characters of an attribute. My code is

String myString = "  Hello  ";
Element myElement = new Element("param").setAttribute("name", "myExample").setText();

this will be saved into the xml as

..
<param name="myExample">Hello</param>
..

but I would like to preserve the spaces:

..
<param name="myExample">  Hello  </param>
..

am I supposed to escape them by hand before setting the text to the Element with e.g :

String myString = "  Hello  ";
myString = myString.replaceAll(" ", "#x20");

?

Thanks,
regards,
Tex