Escaping special characters inside XPATH

Question

I have some elements with the tag <xxx:element> inside my xml.

I want to get these using XPath. I've tried a few ways of getting them but so far unsuccessful.

//xxx:element just doesn't return anything. I'm guessing this is because of the : characater
//#xxx:element# gives the exception: "A location step was expected following the '/' or '//' token."
//'xxx:element' same exception.

Any suggestions?

Based on choroba's answer I found Xml Namespace breaking my xpath!

Answer 1

Found a solution using the local-name property. The following works just fine:
//*[local-name()='element']