Question

I am looking for a good approach to recurse through an XML document without specifying XPATH or XQUERY expressions. Just starting at the root node. I need to hold on to the element and the text of the node.

Something similar to:

    private void RecurseXml(XmlNode root)
    {
        if (root is XmlElement)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(root.Name);
            if (root.HasChildNodes)
                RecurseXmlDocument(root.FirstChild);
            if (root.NextSibling != null)
                RecurseXmlDocument(root.NextSibling);
        }
        else if (root is XmlText)
        {
            string text = ((XmlText)root).Value;
            Console.WriteLine(text);
        }

Where the recursion process determines if their are children or not versus using xpath. The issue with the code I posted is tying the text for the element together. So I can match on the element name in another process I have and set it equal to the value of the text. So I can use conventions to do the mapping.

Answer 1

Any reason you don’t just want to XDocument.Descendants()? I can’t remember whether that’s breadth-first or depth-first, but it will find all the elements in the document recursively…

Note that your sample code uses XmlElement and XmlText, but your tag says xdocument. I saw the tag first, which is what led me to think you were using LINQ to XML. If you’re not using LINQ to XML but could do so, I’d suggest you do that. It’s not entirely clear what you really want to do, but if you just need to print the text of all elements, that’s really easy:

foreach (var element in doc.Descendants())
{
    Console.WriteLine(element.Value);
}

Of course this will write an empty line for “empty” elements – if you want to avoid that, you could just check before writing to the console.