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XML comment contains invalid XML: A name was started with an invalid character

This is the IntelliSense documentation message I get. Something is obviously wrong with my documentation but I can't find what.

    /// <summary>
    /// The local-part of an email adress may use any of these ASCII characters (As according to RFC 5322 <see href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322"></see>):
    /// - Uppercase and lowercase English letters (a–z, A–Z) (ASCII: 65-90, 97-122)
    /// - Digits 0 to 9 (ASCII: 48-57)
    /// - Characters !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~ (ASCII: 33, 35-39, 42, 43, 45, 47, 61, 63, 94-96, 123-126)
    /// - Character . (dot, period, full stop) (ASCII: 46) provided that it is not the first or last character, and provided also that it does not appear two or more times consecutively (e.g. John..Doe@example.com is not allowed.)
    /// - Special characters are allowed with restrictions. They are: Space and "(),:;<>@[\] (ASCII: 32, 34, 40, 41, 44, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 91-93)
    /// - The restrictions for special characters are that they must only be used when contained between quotation marks, and that 3 of them (The space, backslash \ and quotation mark " (ASCII: 32, 92, 34)) must also be preceded by a backslash \ (e.g. "\ \\\"").
    /// </summary>

My guess is that it has something to do with all the characters, but I dunno really...

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1 Answer 1

up vote 7 down vote accepted

On this line:

 /// - Special characters are allowed with restrictions. They are: Space and "(),:;<>@[\] (ASCII: 32, 34, 40, 41, 44, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 91-93)

The < character will be interpreted as the start of an Xml tag (and > as an end). Replace these with &lt; and &gt; respectively. You will also perhaps needs to escape other characters such as & with &amp;.

Here is a comprehensive list of Xml/Html character entities.

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Thanks, works now! I'll accept it in 2 mins when it'll allow me :) –  user1021726 Oct 16 '13 at 8:46

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