&
is an invalid character and should appear escaped as &
or enclosed in a CDATA section.
<teams>
<team id="team1">Mom & Dad</team>
<team id="team2"><![CDATA[Son & Daughter]]></team>
</teams>
From: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#syntax
The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) MUST NOT appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they MUST be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings "
&
" and "<
" respectively.