This seems helpful:
http://stackoverflow...acter-in-xpath-query but it's about single and double quotes mostly.
Guess you're in a deadlock, this
XML spec detail seems to say you can't have a colon in an ordinary node name, but it's referring to an, obviously non-declared, namespace.
Escaping special characters is imho limited to the content part of XML, not the structure part.
You should be able to read your data though, by iterating over all the elements 1 level higher in the XML structure, and that would be /item/, right?