How can I transform XML into a List<string> or String[]?

Question

How can I transform the following XML into a List<string> or String[]:

<Ids>
  <id>1</id>
  <id>2</id>
</Ids>

Answer 1

It sounds like you're more after just parsing rather than full XML serialization/deserialization. If you can use LINQ to XML, this is pretty easy:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;

public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string xml = "<Ids><id>1</id><id>2</id></Ids>";

        XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);

        var list = doc.Root.Elements("id")
                           .Select(element => element.Value)
                           .ToList();

        foreach (string value in list)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(value);
        }
    }
}

In fact the call to Elements could omit the argument as there are only id elements, but I thought I'd demonstrate how to specify which elements you want.

Likewise I'd normally not bother calling ToList unless I really needed a List<string> - without it, the result is IEnumerable<string> which is fine if you're just iterating over it once. To create an array instead, use ToArray.

Answer 2

Here is a way using XmlDocument :

// A string containing the XML data
string xml = "<Ids><id>1</id><id>2</id></Ids>";
// The list you want to fill
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
// Loading from a XML string (use Load() for file)
doc.LoadXml(xml); 
// Selecting node using XPath syntax
XmlNodeList idNodes = doc.SelectNodes("Ids/id");
// Filling the list
foreach (XmlNode node in idNodes)
    list.Add(node.InnerText);