I think that works, but something went wrong when I tried to test it. So I pulled up the trusty audit dialog in the Excel add-in version of our product to see what the formula was in the debugger.
It immediately failed.
What the--?
A bit of debugging later, I discovered that this time they had remembered to encode the string with the quotation marks on the way in, but not to decode it on the way out from the XML format.
To quote the late Casey Stengel, "Can't anybody here play this game?"
I have now coded the XML retrieval to use one of my utility functions that automatically decodes the string output. I had to write a new version of the function, because the one that I had used boost::shared_ptr, while the function I was working with had used std::auto_ptr, but that was a quick substitution.
I don't really care which one we use, but it would be nice if we made up our minds...
Now to see if this damned thing works...