Question

I am performing XML Operations on an XHTML document utilizing Xml and Linq.

When converting it back to a String for outputting to a browser, it renders script tags in their original provided form when creating the XElement as
<script />.

That prevents it being processed correctly by most browsers on the market.

I would like to perform the XElement to String conversion in a way that it outputs the script tag like this <script></script>

Can someone help me on that? Thanks in advance. 🙂

First edit
Providing some more information, the data is coming from an xml field in a MSSQL 2008R2 database.
It is loaded from the xml field as
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" />

Second edit
Working sample

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace Test1
{
    class Test1
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            XElement element = XElement.Parse("<div><script /><script>Test</script></div>");
            var EmptySet = (from e in element.DescendantsAndSelf()
                           where e.IsEmpty
                           select e);
            foreach(XElement e in EmptySet)
            {
                e.Value = String.Empty;
            }
            Console.WriteLine(element.ToString(SaveOptions.None));
        }
    }
}

And its results

<div>
  <script></script>
  <script>Test</script>
</div>

Answer 1

Have you tried using SaveOptions.DisableFormatting?

I can’t actually reproduce the problem, mind you… what XML operations are you performing? Are you creating the script element yourself? This works fine:

using System;
using System.Xml.Linq;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        XElement element = XElement.Parse("<script></script>");
        // Both of these write <script></script>
        Console.WriteLine(element.ToString(SaveOptions.None));
        Console.WriteLine(element.ToString(SaveOptions.DisableFormatting));
    }
}

(XDocument.Save and XElement.Save have the same options.)

EDIT: To change an element with no child nodes into one with a single empty text node, you can just set element.Value to “”. For example:

XElement element = XElement.Parse("<script />");
Console.WriteLine(element.ToString()); // Prints <script />
element.Value = "";
Console.WriteLine(element.ToString()); // Prints <script></script>