Including a URL with query string in an XML document
You can try <URL><![CDATA[http://www.example.com/page?id=1]]></URL>
All text in an XML document will be parsed by the parser.
But text inside a CDATA section will be ignored by the parser. You can find more here.
try this <URL><![CDATA[http://www.mysite.com/page?id=1]]></URL>
As you provide it, the XML is well formed. You don't have anything to escape in it. Maybe you have encoding problems in your source file. For information, the 2 characters you must escape in XML are :
& in &
< in <
Characters you may escape in attributes values (depending on the syntax you use for attributes : attr='value' or attr="value") :
" in "
' in '
Depending on the context, the last character that can be escaped :
> in >