Question

Here is the XML I have in a file:

SPECIAL NOTE:
This is a question for Windows Phone 7, not general C#

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
    <item>
        <date>01/01</date>
        <word>aberrant</word>
        <def>straying from the right or normal way</def>
    </item>

    <item>
        <date>01/02</date>
        <word>Zeitgeist</word>
        <def>the spirit of the time.</def>
    </item>
</rss>

I need it in a List (aka array) of Dictionary objects. Each Dictionary represents an <item>. Each element like <word> is the key with type string and each value like “Zeitgeist” is the value with type string.

Is there any easy way to do this? I’m coming from Objective-C and iOS so this is completely new to me with .NET and C#.

Answer 1

LINQ-to-XML makes it pretty easy. Here’s a complete example:

        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string xml = @"
<rss version='2.0'>
    <item>
        <date>01/01</date>
        <word>aberrant</word>
        <def>straying from the right or normal way</def>
    </item>

    <item>
        <date>01/02</date>
        <word>Zeitgeist</word>
        <def>the spirit of the time.</def>
    </item>
</rss>";
            var xdoc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
            var result = xdoc.Root.Elements("item")
                .Select(itemElem => itemElem.Elements().ToDictionary(e => e.Name.LocalName, e => e.Value))
                .ToList();

        }

Instead of loading from a string with XDocument.Parse(), you would probably do XDocument.Load(filename) but either way you get an XDocument object to work with (I did a string just for example).