Question

I have an XML file that I’m trying to parse with Linq-to-XML. One of the nodes contains a bit of HTML, that I cannot retrieve.

The XML resembles:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<root>
<image><img src="/Images/m1cznk4a6fh7.jpg"  /></image>
<contentType>Banner</contentType>
</root>

The code is:

XDocument document = XDocument.Parse(content.XML);
XElement imageElement = document.Descendants("image").SingleOrDefault();
image = imageElement.Value; // Doesn't get the content, while if I specify .Descendants("contentType") it works

Any ideas?

Answer 1

.Value means any text within a tag and any child tags, but you don’t have any. When you parsed it, <img/> was viewed as an XML tag, not specific for HTML (Linq doesn’t know the difference). For example, if you had your XML written as:

<image>
    <img>/Images/m1cznk4a6fh7.jpg
    </img>
</image>

Then your code would work.

You’ll have to go further in your decendents to the <img/> tag and then get the .Value of attribute src to retrieve the text you need.