How to convert an XmlDocument to an array<byte>?

Question

I constructed an XmlDocument and now I want to convert it to an array. How can this be done?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Try the following:

using System.Text; using System.Xml;  XmlDocument dom = GetDocument() byte[] bytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(dom.OuterXml); 

If you want to preserve the text encoding of the document, then change the Default encoding to the desired encoding, or follow Jon Skeet's suggestion.

Answer 2

Write it to a MemoryStream and then call ToArray on the stream:

using System; using System.IO; using System.Text; using System.Xml;  class Test {     static void Main(string[] args)     {         XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();         XmlElement root = doc.CreateElement("root");         XmlElement element = doc.CreateElement("child");         root.AppendChild(element);         doc.AppendChild(root);          MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();         doc.Save(ms);         byte[] bytes = ms.ToArray();         Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes));     } } 

For more control over the formatting, you can create an XmlWriter from the stream and use XmlDocument.WriteTo(writer).