What is the difference between Linq to XML Descendants and Elements

Question

I have came across both these keywords in the VS IntelliSense. I tried to googling the difference between them and did not get a clear answer. Which one of these have the best performance with small to medium XML files. Thanks

Answer 1

Elements finds only those elements that are direct descendents, i.e. immediate children.

Descendants finds children at any level, i.e. children, grand-children, etc...

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Here is an example demonstrating the difference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <foo>     <bar>Test 1</bar>     <baz>         <bar>Test 2</bar>     </baz>     <bar>Test 3</bar> </foo> 

Code:

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("input.xml"); XElement root = doc.Root;  foreach (XElement e in root.Elements("bar")) {     Console.WriteLine("Elements : " + e.Value); }  foreach (XElement e in root.Descendants("bar")) {     Console.WriteLine("Descendants : " + e.Value); } 

Result:

 Elements : Test 1 Elements : Test 3 Descendants : Test 1 Descendants : Test 2 Descendants : Test 3 

If you know that the elements you want are immediate children then you will get better performance if you use Elements instead of Descendants.