Question

Is there an easy way with LINQ to flatten an XML file?

I can see a number of ways with XSLT but wondered what the best option with LINQ would be?

I cant put the xml structure up exactly as stackoverflow seems to filter chevron chars. But its something like this

nodeA

–nodeA1

–nodeA2

NodeB

I want to end up with

nodeA

nodeA1

nodeA2

NodeB

Answer 1

OK; it depends on the output you want – with XElement you’d need to do a bit of work to remove all the descendent nodes etc. However, it is actually quite simple with XmlDocument:

string xml = @'<xml><nodeA><nodeA1/><nodeA2/></nodeA><NodeB/></xml>';  XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.LoadXml(xml);  XmlDocument clone = new XmlDocument(); XmlElement root = (XmlElement) clone.AppendChild(clone.CreateElement('xml')); foreach(XmlElement el in doc.SelectNodes('//*')) {     root.AppendChild(clone.ImportNode(el, false)); } Console.WriteLine(clone.OuterXml); 

Outputs:

<xml><xml /><nodeA /><nodeA1 /><nodeA2 /><NodeB /></xml> 

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[was] Care to define ‘flatten’ in this context? i.e. ‘before’ and ‘after’? XDocument has Descendants() and DescendantNodes() which might do the job…