Question

I’m positive this is a simple question, but I can’t figure it out.

I’m downloading an XML file to a string in C#, and it contains items in the following format:

<attribute name="Make" value="Volvo" />
<attribute name="Color" value="Blue" />
<attribute name="Damage" value="Rear scratched" />
<attribute name="Damage" value="Left hand side dented" />

And all I want to do is get all of the values for “Damage” in the whole document (Regardless of where they fall) into an array. I’ve been playing with XmlDocument / XmlNodeList but I just can’t figure out how to get this working.

I’m half tempted to do it with RegEx but that feels very very dirty.

Answer 1

Use XDocument:

var doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
var result = doc.Descendants("attribute")
                .Where(x => x.Attribute("name") != null &&
                            x.Attribute("value") != null)
                .Where(x => x.Attribute("name").Value == "Damage")
                .Select(x => x.Attribute("value").Value)
                .ToArray();

Please note:
This code is relatively simple, because it takes all attribute nodes in the whole document into account.