Question

I’ve been trying to pull the value of the XML node into a string. Here is what the XML looks like:

<currentvin value="1FTWW31R08EB18119" /> 

I can’t seem to figure out how to grab that value. I didn’t write this XML, by the way. So far I have tried several approaches, including the following:

    public void xmlParse(string filePath)
    {
        XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
        xml.Load(filePath);
        XmlNode currentVin = xml.SelectSingleNode("/currentvin");
        string xmlVin = currentVin.Value;
        Console.WriteLine(xmlVin);          
    }

Which doesn’t work. I then tried:

    public void xmlParse(string filePath)
    {
        XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
        xml.Load(filePath);
        string xmlVin = xml.SelectSingleNode("/currentvin").Value;
        Console.WriteLine(xmlVin);

    }

But that doesn’t work either. I am getting a null reference exception stating that Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think you’re confusing the Value property of the XmlNode class, with an XML attribute named “value”.

value is an attribute in your xml so either modify your xpath query to be

xml.SelectSingleNode("/currentvin/@value").Value

Or user the Attributes collection of the selected XmlNode.