Question

How can i remove preprocessing instructions from an XML in a greener way? suppose that I have this xml in a string variable (which is a property of a class),I wanted to write it as value of another xml node,How can i achieve it in a cleaner way?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<bookstore> 
  <book genre="autobiography">
    <title>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title>
    <author>
      <first-name>Benjamin</first-name>
      <last-name>Franklin</last-name>
    </author>
    <price>8.99</price>
  </book>
  <book genre="novel">
    <title>The Confidence Man</title>
    <author>
      <first-name>Herman</first-name>
      <last-name>Melville</last-name>
    </author>
    <price>11.99</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>

You help would be much appreciated !!

Answer 1

If you can load it in an XmlDocument: FirstChild returns the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> node, and NextSibling returns the rest.

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(path);
XmlNode node = doc.FirstChild.NextSibling;

Edit: Your xml looks a lot like the example on msdn for XPathNavigator.Select. Have you tried using that?

Edit2: You can get the name of the top level element using:

string topLevelNode = doc.DocumentElement.Name;