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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T15:56:53+00:00

<html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> <head> <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html; charset=windows-1252 /> <meta name=Generator/> </head> <body> <h1>My head

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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />
    <meta name="Generator"/>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My head 1</h1>
  </body>
</html>

This above is the .ToString of my XElement object , html. Looks good.

I am trying to get the body’s innerXml but my XPath returns null.

XElement html = GettheHTMLAsXElementCorrectly()
var whyIsThisNull =  html.XPathSelectElement("/html/body");
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Whenever namespaces are used (in your case in the <html>) you need to define the namespace when searching for nodes:

    Using LINQ to XML
    (In my opinion the easier and cleaner solution)

    // Create a XNamespace instance for the default namespace
XNamespace xhtml = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";

// Select the node using LINQ to XML
var bodyByLinq = doc.Element(xhtml + "html").Element(xhtml + "body");

    Using XPath

    // Create a namespace manager
XmlNamespaceManager namespaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());

// Define your default namespace including a prefix to be used later in the XPath expression
namespaceManager.AddNamespace("xhtml", "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml");

// Select the node using XPath
var bodyByXPath = doc.XPathSelectElement("/xhtml:html/xhtml:body", namespaceManager);

    Update: Improved my answer as the example provided was not correct

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