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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T08:06:42+00:00

I’m doing some transforms using xlinq and some of those transforms can result in

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I’m doing some transforms using xlinq and some of those transforms can result in leaving empty elements in the document.

Once I am done all of those transforms, how can I query an xdocument for all empty elements?

In other words; if I remove all <a> tags which happen to be the only element inside an <li> tag, how do I remove the empty <li>?

Before:

XDocument.Parse(@"<body>
   <ul><li><a href="#">Joy</a></li></ul>
   <p>Hi.</p>
</body>").Descendants("a").Remove();

After:

<body>
   <ul><li/></ul>
   <p>Hi.</p>
</body>

I would prefer:

<body>
   <p>Hi.</p>
</body>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Checking if element doesn’t have attributes and doesn’t have elements is not enough. You need to check if an element is truly empty (absolutely no content). XElement has a property, that actually helps you do that – XElement.IsEmpty.

    var document = XDocument.Parse(@"<body><ul><li><a href='#'>Joy</a></li></ul><p>Hi.</p></body>");
document.Descendants("a").Remove();

var emptyElements = from element in document.Descendants()
                    where element.IsEmpty
                    select element;

while (emptyElements.Any())
    emptyElements.Remove();
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