Question

I am doing some practice code with the XmlTextReader. I have written some very basic XML as shown here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<task name="mixed_sprite_task_test">
    <sprite>
        <type>animatedSprite</type>
        <id>0</id>
        <name>animatedSprite</name>
        <fileName>iyezoz</fileName>
        <startingPositionX>200</startingPositionX>
        <startingPositionY>200</startingPositionY>
        <sheetSizeX>12</sheetSizeX>
        <sheetSizeY>35</sheetSizeY>
        <startingFrameX>0</startingFrameX>
        <startingFrameY>0</startingFrameY>
        <startingState>standing</startingState>
        <movementSpeed>15</movementSpeed>
        <frameDelay>0.055</frameDelay>
    </sprite>
    <sprite>
        <type>staticSprite</type>
        <id>0</id>
        <name>staticSprite</name>
        <fileName>Super_Mario_63</fileName>
        <startingPositionX>0</startingPositionX>
        <startingPositionY>0</startingPositionY>
    </sprite>
    <sprite>
        <type>simpleSprite</type>
        <id>0</id>
        <name>simpleSprite</name>
        <fileName>imgres</fileName>
        <startingPositionX>100</startingPositionX>
        <startingPositionY>100</startingPositionY>
        <movementSpeed>15</movementSpeed>
    </sprite>
</task>

This file shows that I have a task. In the task I have 3 sprites.
In my code I want to loop through each sprite and collect the information.

I can get the data from the first sprite with no issue. Is there a certain way to loop through an xml with attributes of the same name?

Thank-you!

Answer 1

I prefer Linq2Xml.

var xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xmlstring); //or XDocument.Load(filename);
var sprites = xDoc.Descendants("sprite")
                .Select(s=>s.Elements()
                            .ToDictionary(e=>e.Name.LocalName,e=>(string)e))
                .ToList();

You can use it as

var type = sprites[0]["type"];

or can take a safe action

string delay;
if (sprites[1].TryGetValue("frameDelay", out delay))
{
    Console.WriteLine(delay);
}