ASP.net load XML file from URL

Question

Trying to just simply parse an XML file;

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();//xml doc used for xml parsing

        xdoc.LoadXml("http://latestpackagingnews.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default");//loading XML in xml doc

        XmlNodeList xNodelst = xdoc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("entry");//reading node so that we can traverse thorugh the XML

        foreach (XmlNode xNode in xNodelst)//traversing XML 
        {
            litFeed.Text += "read";
        }

    }

But I get:

Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.

Do I have to do an XMLHTTP request to the file first? Or am I right to assume I can load it in from an external url?

Answer 1

try this :

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

    XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();//xml doc used for xml parsing

    xdoc.Load(
        "http://latestpackagingnews.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
        );//loading XML in xml doc

    XmlNodeList xNodelst = xdoc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("entry");//reading node so that we can traverse thorugh the XML

    foreach (XmlNode xNode in xNodelst)//traversing XML 
    {
        litFeed.Text += "read";
    }

}

LoadXml is waiting for an xml string directly, where Load can use an uri to grab the xml data. With your code, the xml parser was actually trying to parse the adress as xml, not the content at the uri location.

[Edit] you may take a look at the builtin feed processing classes of the .Net Framework. These classes are in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace. They can to the parsing job for you quite easily.