Question

Suppose I have some XmlElement; let’s call it element. If I want to get all of the child nodes of that element, I can call element.ChildNodes. If I want the text of the element and all its children, then I can go with element.InnerText.

However, suppose I have some XML that looks like this:

<TopElement attr1="value1" attr2="value2">
    This is the text I want.
    <ChildElement1>This is text I don't want.</ChildElement1>
    <ChildElement2>This is more text I don't want.</ChildElement2>
</TopElement>

If I go with element.InnerText, what I get is this:

This is the text I want.This is text I
don’t want.This is more text I don’t
want.

If I want just the text within TopElement but NOT any of its children, I can do this:

Dim txt As String
For Each child As Xml.XmlNode In XmlElement.ChildNodes
    If TypeOf child Is Xml.XmlText Then
        txt = child.InnerText
        Exit For
    End If
Next

But this seems quite silly to me. Surely there is a better way?

EDIT: Sorry I didn’t specify this initially: I’m looking for a solution not involving LINQ (we’re in the Dark Ages over here with .NET 2.0).

Answer 1

You can use an XPath expression that specifically looks for a text node (sorry for the C#)

XmlText text = doc.SelectSingleNode("/TopElement/text()") as XmlText;
if (text != null)
{
    Console.WriteLine(text.Value);
}

(Where doc is an XmlDocument containing your XML)