Question

I have some XML;

<data>
  <name1>James</name1>
  <name2>John</name2>
  etc..
</data>

The name1, name2, etc could be anything, i want to be able to get this xml into a dictionary ideally, is this possible using the built in .net serialisation?

Thanks,
James.

EDIT: Ideally i dont want to use linq. Is it possible to serialise the whole element array to a string? So i’d end up with a string object ‘Data’ that contained all the child element tags and data?

Answer 1

No, but you can use Linq-to-Xml to do so:

XDocument.Load([file path, stream, whatever]).Descendants("data").Descendants()
    .ToDictionary(element => element.Name, element => element.Value)

UPDATE:
As OP said in his edit, if there’s no way to use Linq-to-Xml, then you¡ll need to customize XML serialization implementing IXmlSerializable (you might want to check this other Q&A: custom xml serialization ).