Question

I have just started using LINQ to XML, and I am having trouble getting the text contents of a given XElement without getting the text contents of all the child elements as well.

So for example, if I have the following XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<root xmlns="example.org/rootns">This is root value
    <children>
        <child name='child 1'>value 1</child>
        <child name='child 2'>value 2
            <grandchild name='grandchild A'>value A</grandchild>
        </child>
    </children>
</root>

And I use the following Test method:

private static void Test()
{
    string xString = @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8"" ?><root xmlns=""example.org/rootns"">This is root value<children><child name='child 1'>value 1</child><child name='child 2'>value 2<grandchild name='grandchild A'>value A</grandchild></child></children></root>";

    var xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xString);

    XNamespace ns = @"example.org/rootns";
    string elemName = "child";

    var xElems = from e in xDoc.Descendants(ns + elemName)
                 select e;

    foreach (var xElem in xElems)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(xElem.Value);
    }
}

Then I get two lines on output:

    value 1
    value 2value A

The first line shows the content of the first child – this is okay. The second line however shows not only the text content of the first child, but also any decendants of that child.

How can I get the text content of just the second child without the grandchild’s text content as well?

Also note that the sample is just a simple example to illustrate what I am doing, and in production I will not necessarily know what the child elements are called (if any), but I should be able to get the element I need to get the text content from.

---

Jon Skeet’s answer helped with the solution. Just replace the foreach loop with the following to select text XNodes rather than the XElement’s value:

...
foreach (var xElem in xElems)
{
    var values = from n in xElem.Nodes()
                 where n.NodeType == System.Xml.XmlNodeType.Text
                 select n;

    if (values != null && values.Count() > 0)
        Console.WriteLine(values.First());
}

Answer 1

What do you want to do if there are multiple text nodes? For example, you could join them all together:

var text = string.Join("", element.Nodes.OfType<XText>().Select(x => x.Value));

EDIT: If you only want a single element, it’s easier than you’ve shown:

var textNode = xElem.Nodes().OfType<XText>().FirstOrDefault();
if (textNode != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine(textNode.Value);
}