Escaping Ampersand in the HCat URI to bypass XML validation

Uncovered during end-to-end testing. In an HCat URI like this
hcat://<server>:<port>/db/table/partition1=abc&partition2=xyz, the '&' between the partition key-value pairs, fails XML validation. It needs to be escaped - but keeping in mind
1. HCat URIs are stored as missing dependencies in database. Each time they are retrieved, the logic needs to check for the escaping (very frequent and increases overhead)
2. When displaying back to the user his missing dependencies, the original unescaped URI should be shown.

Alternatives for approach:
1. Asking the user to use the encoded string "&" in his URI-template is a usability-killer.
2. The other alternative is to use some other separator instead of ampersand, which does not conflict existing separators in Oozie, such as colon (, but it is highly non-intuitive in a URI

Therefore to me, the lesser of two evils seems to do escape logic during XML validation, storing separator as something else internally for db retrievals, and again showing original '&' for display to user.

Please provide your thoughts.