Question

I need to parse an XLIFF file using C#, but I’m having some trouble. These files are fairly complex, containing a huge amount of nodes.

Basically, all I need to do is read the source node from each trans-unit node, do some processing on it, and insert the processed text into the corresponding target node (which will always be present, but empty).

An example of one of the nodes I need to parse would be (the whole file may contain 100s of these):

<trans-unit id="0000000002" datatype="text" restype="string">
<source>Windows Update is not installed</source>
<target/>
<iws:segment-metadata tm_score="0.00" ws_word_count="6" max_segment_length="0">
<iws:status target_content="placeholders_only"/>
</iws:segment-metadata>
<iws:boundary-seg sequence="bs20721"/>
<iws:markup-seg sequence="0000000001">
</trans-unit>

The trans-unit nodes can be buried deep in the files, the header section contains a lot of data. I’d like to use LINQ to XML to read the data, but I’m not having any luck getting it to work. Here’s my current code (just trying to read and output the source nodes from the file:

        XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(path);

        Console.WriteLine("Before loop");

        foreach (var transUnitNode in doc.Descendants("trans-unit"))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("In loop");
            XElement sourceNode = transUnitNode.Element("source");
            XElement targetNode = transUnitNode.Element("target");
            Console.WriteLine("Source: " + sourceNode.Value);
        }

I never see ‘In loop’ and I don’t know why, can someone tell me what I’m doing wrong here, or suggest a better way to achieve what I’m trying to do here?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try

XNamespace df = doc.Root.Name.Namespace;
foreach (XElement transUnitNode in doc.Descendants(df + "trans-unit"))
{
  XElement sourceNode = transUnitNode.Element(df + "source");
  // and so one, use the df namespace object to qualify any elements names
}

See also http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387093.aspx.