You are looking at the HTML representation of the XML format.
HTML is good for debugging, but probably is not suitable for your application.
See complete documentation, or API help for more information. 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <parse displaytitle="API">
    <text xml:space="preserve">&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/mediawiki/index.php?title=HookED_Wiki:Sandbox&amp;amp;action=edit&amp;amp;redlink=1&quot; class=&quot;new&quot; title=&quot;HookED Wiki:Sandbox (page does not exist)&quot;&gt;HookED Wiki:Sandbox&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;!-- Tidy found serious XHTML errors --&gt;

&lt;!-- 
NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 2/1000000
Post-expand include size: 24/2097152 bytes
Template argument size: 0/2097152 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 0/100
--&gt;
</text>
    <langlinks />
    <categories />
    <links>
      <pl ns="4" xml:space="preserve">HookED Wiki:Sandbox</pl>
    </links>
    <templates>
      <tl ns="4" xml:space="preserve">HookED Wiki:Sandbox</tl>
    </templates>
    <images />
    <externallinks />
    <sections />
  </parse>
</api>