exporting objects that include special chars in the xml block fails the export.

example chars found: Ç, É, Ê , À
there are many more, depending on the language used (german, frensh, russian, etc), a few chars will cause the error.

steps to reproduce:
1 - active ezRecommentation
2 - publish any object that has an attribute of type ezRecommendation (to trigger the export)
2 - include one of the special chars above
3 - republish the object
4 - a fatal error will be displayed.

the origin of the problem is in the htmlentities() that changes the encoding from ISO- to UTF-8, according to the doc here:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php