converting a rss download stream to a string

[hd95]

I have an rss download stream I am parsing using the xmltextreader object.
I am finding that lone ampersands and dashes in the content are screwing up the parsing process. If someone knows how to solve that issue then I don't need to do what I'm trying to do which is...

load the stream into a string and do a find/replace there.
i tried this.....

 
           Dim bteRead() As Byte
            Dim strRead As String
            Dim lngRead As Long

            lngRead = rssStream.Length
            ReDim bteRead(lngRead)
            rssStream.Read(bteRead, 0, lngRead)
            strRead = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(bteRead)

but since the stream isn't all in memory the length property isn't known and she blows up.

Thanks in advance for any help