Question

Can’t seem to find how to appropriately parse this using XElement:

<messages>
  <message subclass="a" context="d" key="g">
  <message subclass="b" context="e" key="h">
  <message subclass="c" context="f" key="i">
</messages>

I’d like to get this out to a List where is three strings subclass, context, key.

Answer 1

Your input is not valid XML, it’s missing closing tags on the inner message elements. But assuming the format was valid, you could parse out your structure as in:

string xml = @"<messages> 
                  <message subclass=""a"" context=""d"" key=""g""/> 
                  <message subclass=""b"" context=""e"" key=""h""/> 
                  <message subclass=""c"" context=""f"" key=""i""/> 
               </messages>";

var messagesElement = XElement.Parse(xml);
var messagesList = (from message in messagesElement.Elements("message")
                   select new 
                    {
                        Subclass = message.Attribute("subclass").Value,
                        Context = message.Attribute("context").Value,
                        Key = message.Attribute("key").Value
                    }).ToList();

You can also use XDocument for a full XML document, and use the Load method instead of Parse if you were using an XML file or a stream, for example. Additionally, you can select into a concrete class if you have one defined. Given a class definition of

class Message 
{
    public string Subclass { get; set; }
    public string Context { get; set; } 
    public string Key { get; set; }
}

You could use select new Message in the query, and the result would be a List<Message>, whereas right now it is a list of an anonymous type.