title: Using LINQ to XML to get specific descendants node value
body: <p>I have an XML document I am trying to query with LINQ to XML. The XML is ..</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
  &lt;response&gt;
    &lt;operation&gt;
      &lt;authentication&gt;
        &lt;username&gt;redacted&lt;/username&gt;
        &lt;isauthenticated&gt;true&lt;/&lt;isauthenticated&gt;&gt;
      &lt;/authentication&gt;
      &lt;result&gt;
        &lt;status&gt;success&lt;/status&gt;
        &lt;other-elements&gt;&lt;/&lt;other-elements&gt;
        &lt;other-elements&gt;&lt;/&lt;other-elements&gt;
        &lt;other-elements&gt;
          &lt;other-sub-elements&gt;&lt;/other-sub-elements&gt;
          &lt;other-sub-elements&gt;&lt;/other-sub-elements&gt;
        &lt;/&lt;other-elements&gt;
      &lt;/result&gt;
    &lt;/operation&gt;
  &lt;/response&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am trying to read the value of the node <code>&lt;status&gt;</code> to determine if the API call was successful. I am having trouble putting together the LINQ syntax necessary to grab the value of the <code>&lt;status</code> node. I thought I could use XPath syntax as such to grab the value.</p>
  
  <pre><code>XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(xmlResponse);
  string returnValue = = xml.Descendants("result/status").Select(x =&gt; x.Name).ToString(); 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I am getting the following error ..</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The '/' character, hexadecimal value 0x2F, cannot be included in a name.</p>
  </blockquote>