In my page.tal I have a copyright statement at the bottom that uses the xhtml entity # (that is, & #169; 2008 ... whitespace added to prevent rendering as the entity itself). When page.tal is processed, the output (viewing the source that is) no longer contains the entity but a single unrecognizable character (which firefox shows as a diamond with a question mark).

Additionally, when my tal:content="structure content", and the $content variable contains html entities, the parsing fails, stopping output at the error. In my log I get this:

Message htmlspecialchars() [function.htmlspecialchars]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/PHPTAL/Context.php on line 387.
Severity error

Any ideas?