cannot get "\"while reading an xml file

Question

I'm trying to read an xml page of xwiki line by line but when i read this line:

[[3.2.2>>doc:3\.2\.2]]

it returns just

[[3.2.2>>doc:3.2.2]]

any ideas why it ignores \ .

so i have an xwiki page localPäge.xml :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><page xmlns="http://www.xwiki.org"><content>
====[[PROJECTS>>WebHome]]/[[SCV>>SCV]]/composant1====

|=Release|=date

|[[3.3.3>>doc:3\.3\.3]]|2015-06-25:14:23:20
</content>
</page>

what i'm doing is just

while read i
do
echo "$i">>PageToSend.xml
done < localPage.xml

in pageToSend.xml instead of having

|[[3.3.3>>doc:3\.3\.3]]|2015-06-25:14:23:20 

i have this

|[[3.3.3>>doc:=3.3.3]]|2015-06-25:14:23:20 

and what i want is to keep the famous "\" .