XDocument.Parse Success or Failure?

Question

I am using

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(somestring);

But how do I validate if the string somestring is a well formed XML. Is Try Catch the only way to do this?

Answer 1

Is Try Catch the only way to do this?

There is no TryParse method for XDocument, so try-catch is probably the best bet. Also consider validating your XML against a schema since it will not only check if the XML is well-formed, but also checks for constraints.

You may see: Validation Against XML Schema (XSD) with the XmlValidatingReader

Answer 2

If you only need to check whether the document is well-formed, the fastest way is to use XmlReader as follows:

var isWellFormedXml = true;
try
{
    using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream)) // can be a mem stream for string validation
    {
        while (reader.Read()) {}
    }
}
catch
{
    isWellFormedXml = false;
}

This way you don't spend memory for XDocument DOM. BTW, XDocument.Parse() uses XmlReader for processing XML, so the exceptions are the same, if you need to analyse them.