Iterating through all nodes in XML file

Question

I want to iterate through all nodes in an XML file and print their names. What is the best way to do this? I am using .NET 2.0.

Answer 1

You can use XmlDocument. Also some XPath can be useful.

Just a simple example

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.Load("sample.xml"); XmlElement root = doc.DocumentElement; XmlNodeList nodes = root.SelectNodes("some_node"); // You can also use XPath here foreach (XmlNode node in nodes) {    // use node variable here for your beeds } 

Answer 2

I think the fastest and simplest way would be to use an XmlReader, this will not require any recursion and minimal memory foot print.

Here is a simple example, for compactness I just used a simple string of course you can use a stream from a file etc.

  string xml = @"     <parent>       <child>         <nested />       </child>       <child>         <other>         </other>       </child>     </parent>     ";    XmlReader rdr = XmlReader.Create(new System.IO.StringReader(xml));   while (rdr.Read())   {     if (rdr.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element)     {       Console.WriteLine(rdr.LocalName);     }   } 

The result of the above will be

parent child nested child other 

A list of all the elements in the XML document.