Need fix for escaped characters in article id string.

Hi,
What’s going on is that the article ID for a post is displaying on screen. The generated source looks like this:

370<article class=”invite” id=\”\”>

As you can see, the 370 should be after the id=.

What is actually in my template is:

echo ‘<article class=”invite” id=\”‘ . the_ID() . ‘\”>’ . “\n”;

I’m not sure why the one ” has to be escaped, the the previous ones do not. Either way, can someone tell me what’s wrong with this line?

Thank you