How do I retrieve element text inside CDATA markup via XPath?

Question

Consider the following xml fragment:

<Obj>    <Name><![CDATA[SomeText]]></Name> </Obj> 

How do I retrieve the "SomeText" value via XPath? I'm using Nauman Leghari's (excellent) Visual XPath tool.
/Obj/Name returns the element
/Obj/Name/text() returns blank

I don't think its a problem with the tool (I may be wrong) - I also read XPath can't extract CDATA (See last response in this thread) - which sounds kinda weird to me.

Answer 1

/Obj/Name/text() is the XPath to return the content of the CDATA markup.

What threw me off was the behavior of the Value property. For an XMLNode (DOM world), the XmlNode.Value property of an Element (with CDATA or otherwise) returns Null. The InnerText property would give you the CDATA/Text content. If you use Xml.Linq, XElement.Value returns the CDATA content.

string sXml = @" <object>     <name><![CDATA[SomeText]]></name>     <name>OtherName</name> </object>";  XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument(); xmlDoc.LoadXml( sXml ); XmlNamespaceManager nsMgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);  Console.WriteLine(@"XPath = /object/name" ); WriteNodesToConsole(xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/object/name", nsMgr));  Console.WriteLine(@"XPath = /object/name/text()" ); WriteNodesToConsole( xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/object/name/text()", nsMgr) );  Console.WriteLine(@"Xml.Linq = obRoot.Elements(""name"")"); XElement obRoot = XElement.Parse( sXml ); WriteNodesToConsole( obRoot.Elements("name") ); 

Output:

XPath = /object/name         NodeType = Element         Value = <null>         OuterXml = <name><![CDATA[SomeText]]></name>         InnerXml = <![CDATA[SomeText]]>         InnerText = SomeText          NodeType = Element         Value = <null>         OuterXml = <name>OtherName</name>         InnerXml = OtherName         InnerText = OtherName  XPath = /object/name/text()         NodeType = CDATA         Value = SomeText         OuterXml = <![CDATA[SomeText]]>         InnerXml =         InnerText = SomeText          NodeType = Text         Value = OtherName         OuterXml = OtherName         InnerXml =         InnerText = OtherName  Xml.Linq = obRoot.Elements("name")         Value = SomeText         Value = OtherName 

Turned out the author of Visual XPath had a TODO for the CDATA type of XmlNodes. A little code snippet and I have CDATA support now.

MainForm.cs

private void Xml2Tree( TreeNode tNode, XmlNode xNode) {    ...    case XmlNodeType.CDATA:       //MessageBox.Show("TODO: XmlNodeType.CDATA");       // Gishu                           TreeNode cdataNode = new TreeNode("![CDATA[" + xNode.Value + "]]");       cdataNode.ForeColor = Color.Blue;       cdataNode.NodeFont = new Font("Tahoma", 12);       tNode.Nodes.Add(cdataNode);       //Gishu       break;