Detecting \u0000 in a string...

Hi! I was wondering if anyone here had experienced a simliar problem to mine. I am updating an Oracle XMLType column with XML built using DOM that is populated with values from an Excel spreadsheet saved out as a CSV. My problem is that for certain (apparently) random rows the xml updated will fail with the error: Warning: oci_execute(): OCIStmtExecute: ORA-31011: XML parsing failed ORA-19202: Error occurred in XML processing LPX-00217: invalid character 0 (\u0000) Error at line 1 ORA-06512: at "SYS.XMLTYPE", line 5 ORA-06512: at line 1 in /path/ob/fu/scated/archive.inc on line 1374 I have googled around and a Java fix for the problem seemed to revolve around a null char being left on the end of the XML string, so I tried stripping the last char from the string but this did not help. I then used an ordUTF8 function I found in the manual notes to see if I could find the null in the string - again, no luck. So my question is whether or not anyone here has a reliable way of detcting and removing \u0000 chars from strings? regards, Mikey