How do I convert Byte Array response from WebClient to Xml?

Question

I am calling a third party service and they send the response as Xml. However, as I am using WebClient to call the service the response I get is a byte array.

var client = new WebClient();
var result = client.UploadValues(post_url, data);

result is a byte array. How do I convert it to XML to read the response given by the third party service?

Answer 1

You can turn the bytes into a string:

string xml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(result);

and then parse it :

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);

Answer 2

Use a MemoryStream:

using (var stream = new MemoryStream(result))
{
    var doc = XDocument.Load(stream);
    ...
}