escape special characters in parser's input

I hope this is the appropriate forum for this. I'm using jakarta Digester to parse an xml file coming from a backend system. It's going to be large and it contains in some of the xml values brackets and other things that confuse parsers. Is there anyway, either in Digester or in the XSD definition I'm making to describe this data, that I can make the parser ignore characters such as this? I'm looking at solutions that I can do on my end, rather than with the backend, they're fairly limited in what they can do. If I'm not mistaken, dtds have the ability of declaring elements with CDATA which told the parser to ignore the value and continue on. Is there something equivalent with XSDs? Thanks in advance.

- M

I'm sorry. I can't answer your question. I haven't used Digester. However, I noticed that some people in the XML and Related Technologies have talked about it, and also some people in the Other Open Source Projects forum.