Name cannot begin with the ' ' character

Question

I\'m parsing some XML in C#. I\'m getting it from a database, and so converting it to a MemoryStream before reading it with an XmlTextReader. The problem is that I get this

Answer 1

I was getting the same error reading an XML file.

It turned out I had an errant < character in my file.

I was commenting out certain child nodes and when erasing one of the comment tags, I left an extra < in the file. The error message came back "Name cannot begin with the '\r' character" and this question was the top google result for that exact search.

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