Special Characters in the Title Tag

[internetheaven]

Been reading speculation that special characters are frowned upon by Google:

Would that include &, ?, %, £ <, > or [vertical bar]?

Has anyone seen anything by Google on this e.g. you should use "and" in the title tag instead of "&" or that if you want special characters you have to encode it &, " etc?

I use &, ? and [vertical bar] a lot for different reasons on various sites.

[gn_wendy]

i support for a site with a hindi and korean version. they have special characters that are working fine...

[dstiles]

Ampersand (&) instroduces HTML Entities so that would be a no-no anywhere on a web page (the VISUAL character & encoded as an Entity, fine).

The angle brackets, I would have thought, might confuse poor quality html parsers - I wouldn't use them anywhere except as html coding.

I've used and seen vertical bar as a content splitter.

I would always encode £ as an HTML Entity.

The other characters - not sure.

Basically, I think, does the W3 validator accept it?