Question

I’m using C# with .net 3.5 and have a few cases where I want to replace some substrings in the XML attributes of an XmlDocument with something else.

One case is to replace the single quote character with ' and the other is to clean up some files that contain valid XML but the attributes’ values are no longer appropriate (say replace anything attribute which starts with “myMachine” with “newMachine”).

Is there a simple way to do this, or do I need to go through each attribute of every node (recursively)?

Answer 1

One way to approach it is to select a list of the correct elements using Linq to XML, and then iterate over that list. Here’s an example one-liner:

 XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(path);
 doc.XPathSelectElements("//element[@attribute-name = 'myMachine']").ToList().ForEach(x => x.SetAttributeValue("attribute-name", "newMachine"));

You could also do a more traditional iteration.