Invalid character entity parsing xml in node js

I am trying to parse a string of xml and I getting an error 

[Error: Invalid character entity
Line: 0
Column: 837
Char:  ]

Does xml not like brackets? Do I need to replace all the brackets with something like \\]. Thanks

Ok, the invalid character was the dash and an &. I fixed it by doing the following:

xml = data.testSteps.replace(/[\n\r]/g, '\\n')
                    .replace(/&/g,"&")
                    .replace(/-/g,"-");

Thanks