Removing escape characters from a string (xml) and sending it to a WCF service

I'm trying to make a POST http request to my WCF Service and send ti some data in XML. I tried building an XML string both using XmlWriter and just string开发者_如何学运维 concatenation, but I always have escaping characters (\" and other) in my string, and so my POST fails.

This is how I build an XML String:

        var data = string.Empty;
        data += (@"<Root xmlns=""http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/..."" xmlns:i=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"">");
        data += (String.Format("<Element1>{0}</Element1>", element1));
        data += (String.Format("<Element2>{0}</Element2>", element1));
        data += (String.Format("<Element3>{0}</Element3>", element1));
        data += (String.Format("<Element4>{0}</Element4>", element4));
        data += (String.Format("</Root>"));

and I get \" characters in Root element because of xmlns attribute and its value. That's why my POST alaways returns 400 Bad Request. This is how I make a POST:

        var req = WebRequest.Create(uri);

        req.ContentType = "application/xml; charset=utf-8";
        req.Method = "POST";

        var bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);
        req.ContentLength = bytes.Length;

        var os = req.GetRequestStream();
        os.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
        os.Flush();
        os.Close();

        var response = _GetResponseString(req.GetResponse());

        return response;

How to get rid of unwanted characters and make this POST working?

As you confirmed in the comments, the problem wasn't the escaped characters (it's usually a red herring that the watch window in VS shows them as if they were escaped), but something else.

Almost all the time where you have a problem where a WCF service is returning a 400 / 500 error to the client, enabling tracing should point you to the right direction in fixing the issue.