In the deployment settings of Gearset, team owners can set the XML quote escaping style to 3 different values:

Unescaped style
Metadata API style
SFDX source style (this is the default)

Please note: This setting is team-wide and affects how commits/deployments to git branches are formatted.

Here are the ways that the formatting are different:

Unescaped style

Uses the characters ' and " in XML nodes.
The setting will convert UTF-8 into lower case utf-8 in the XML header

Why is there also a deprecated “unescaped style” option?

The previous version of the unescaped style had an issue where quotes were not always converted to the " and ' characters, leading to inconsistent styles. Users already using the previous version can continue to use it if they wish, or switch to the updated version. Please note that after switching, you may see some additional noise in git deployments due to quotes being updated to the correct style.

Metadata API style

To be consistent with the Salesforce metadata API, the setting:

converts quotes in XML nodes to " and '
converts the encoding info from utf-8 into UTF-8

SFDX source style

To be consistent with the Salesforce DX project/source format, the setting:

converts quotes in XML nodes to " and '
converts the encoding info from utf-8 into UTF-8

ActivateRss not defined

Glossary of terms

What does Gearset’s repo dependency cleaner do?

Setting up your first Gearset Pipeline