Question

I’m pretty new to xml and I don’t know how to read/get values from xml file below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Jeopardy>
  <category name = 'People in Computing'>
<first points = '100' answer = 'Alan Turing'>Known as the questioner of the human   mind, this man is known for helping tell humans and computers apart.</first>
<second points = '200' answer = 'Grace Hopper'>This female pioneer of the COBOL computer programming language was an Admiral in the US Navy.</second>
<third points = '300' answer = 'Tim Berners-Lee'>Called the father of the world wide web, this man is the director of the W3C.</third>
<fourth points = '400' answer = 'Lawrence Lessig'>An American academic and political activist who founded the Creative Commons, this man lobbies for reduced legal restrictions on copyrights and trademarks in the technology sector.</fourth>
<fifth points = '500' answer = 'Ada Lovelace'>This woman, known as the world's first computer programmer was also a Countess.</fifth>
  </category>
</Jeopardy>

Sorry for the terrible formatting, can’t get it right.

First of all, I tried to load this file in XDocument results in a “Non-white space cannot be added to content” exception, but it didn’t occur if loaded into XmlDocument.

My code to attempt to get the name value:

        string fileName = @"C:\Users\Kara\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\Final Project\Final Project\Jeopardy.xml";

        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

        doc.Load(fileName);

        List<string> categories = new List<string>();

        XmlNodeList nList = doc.SelectNodes("/category/name");

        foreach (XmlNode node in nList)
        {
            categories.Add(node.ToString());
        }

Sadly while debugging the nList has a count of zero and I cannot figure out why. I’ve tried looking at a ton of questions already on here and tutorials elsewhere and I’m just getting frustrated. How in the world do I get the values out of name and other nodes? Can someone explain this? And perhaps why I get the non-white space error with XDocument?

Answer 1

doc.SelectNodes("/category/name")

You’re not finding any nodes because 1) the first node is Jeopardy, not category and 2) name is an attribute of category not a child element.

Try: doc.SelectNodes("/Jeopardy/category/@name")

Like this:

foreach (XmlNode node in nList) {
  categories.Add(node.Value);
}