Select a subset of childnodes by name

Question

Given this xml doc

<listOfItem>   <Item id="1">      <attribute1 type="foo"/>     <attribute2 type="bar"/>     <property type="x"/>     <property type="y"/>     <attribute3 type="z"/>   </Item>   <Item>    //... same child nodes   </Item>  //.... other Items </listOfItems> 

Given this xml document, I would like to select, for each "Item" node, just the "property" child nodes. How can I do it in c# directly? With "directly" I mean without selecting all the child nodes of Item and then check one by one. So far:

XmlNodeList nodes = xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName("Item"); foreach(XmlNode node in nodes) {    doSomething()    foreach(XmlNode child in node.ChildNodes)    {      if(child.Name == "property")      {         doSomethingElse()      }    } } 

Answer 1

You can use SelectNodes(xpath) method instead of ChildNodes property:

foreach(XmlNode child in node.SelectNodes("property")) {     doSomethingElse() } 

Demo.

Answer 2

Try using LINQ to XML instead of XML DOM as it's much simpler syntax for what you want to do.

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(filename); foreach (var itemElement in doc.Element("listOfItems").Elements("Item")) {    var properties = itemElement.Elements("property").ToList(); }