character entities in XPATH (en dash)

I had the following in a FOSI:
<specval attname="starts-with(normalize-space(.),'-')" attloc="#XPATH" attval="1">

which worked as expected,but AE 6.0 automagically converted it to:
<specval attname="starts-with(normalize-space(.),'-')" attloc="#XPATH" attval="1">