XPath select node with namespace

Question

Its a .vbproj and looks like this

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">     <PropertyGroup>         <ProjectGuid>15a7ee82-9020-4fda-a7fb-85a61664692d</ProjectGuid> 

all i want to get is the ProjectGuid but it does not work when a namespace is there...

 Dim xmlDoc As New XmlDocument()  Dim filePath As String = Path.Combine(mDirectory, name + "\" + name + ".vbproj")  xmlDoc.Load(filePath)  Dim value As Object = xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/Project/PropertyGroup/ProjectGuid") 

what can i do to fix this?

Answer 1

I'd probably be inclined to go with Bartek's* namespace solution, but a general xpath solution is:

//*[local-name()='ProjectGuid']

**since Bartek's answer has disappeared, I recommend Teun's (which is actually more thorough)*

Answer 2

The best way to do things like this (IMHO) is to create a namespace manager. This can be used calling SelectNodes to indicate which namespace URLs are connected to which prefixes. I normally set up a static property that returns an adequate instance like this (it's C#, you'll have to translate):

private static XmlNamespaceManager _nsMgr; public static XmlNamespaceManager NsMgr {   get   {     if (_nsMgr == null)     {       _nsMgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());       _nsMgr.AddNamespace("msb", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003");     }     return _nsMgr;   } } 

I include only one namespace here, but you could have multiple. Then you can select from the document like this:

Dim value As Object = xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/msb:Project/msb:PropertyGroup/msb:ProjectGuid", NsMgr) 

Note that all of the elements are in the specified namespace.