The patch is incorrect. Even though this may let get these characters "through", the other end will have no clue that \x is meant as an escape.

Please face the ugly truth: XML (and hence XML-RPC) just does not support these characters, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-Char

This is fixed slightly in XML 1.1 (which allows to refer to these characters by character reference), however, XML 1.1 is not used for XML-RPC, so this is not an option.

I'm closing this as "won't fix". If there is interest in doing something about it, I could accept a patch that rejects non-Char characters with an exception, instead of sending ill-formed XML. I'd recommend to use a regular expression for that.