XmlTextReader vs. XDocument

Question

I'm in the position to parse XML in .NET. Now I have the choice between at least XmlTextReader and XDocument. Are there any comparisons between those two (or any other XML parsers contained in the framework)?

Maybe this could help me to decide without trying both of them in depth.

The XML files are expected to be rather small, speed and memory usage are a minor issue compared to easiness of use. :-)

(I'm going to use them from C# and/or IronPython.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're happy reading everything into memory, use XDocument. It'll make your life much easier. LINQ to XML is a lovely API.

Use an XmlReader (such as XmlTextReader) if you need to handle huge XML files in a streaming fashion, basically. It's a much more painful API, but it allows streaming (i.e. only dealing with data as you need it, so you can go through a huge document and only have a small amount in memory at a time).

There's a hybrid approach, however - if you have a huge document made up of small elements, you can create an XElement from an XmlReader positioned at the start of the element, deal with the element using LINQ to XML, then move the XmlReader onto the next element and start again.