Question

These two LINQ to XML methods seem to be doing the same thing. Would like to know the difference between the two.

var xdoc = XDocument.Load(filename);

xdoc.Root.FirstNode.ElementsAfterSelf();
xdoc.Root.FirstNode.NodesAfterSelf();

Both return methods return

<Title Name="Cooking with Computers: Surreptitious Balance Sheets" Price="11.9500">
  <Authors>
    <Author Name="O'Leary, O'Leary" />
    <Author Name="MacFeather, MacFeather" />
  </Authors>
</Title>  
<Title Name="You Can Combat Computer Stress!" Price="2.9900">
  <Authors>
    <Author Name="Green, Green" />
  </Authors>
</Title>  

Here is the XML

<PubsDatabase>
  <Title Name="The Busy Executive's Database Guide" Price="19.9900">
    <Authors>
      <Author Name="Green, Green" />
      <Author Name="Bennet, Bennet" />
    </Authors>
  </Title>
  <Title Name="Cooking with Computers: Surreptitious Balance Sheets" Price="11.9500">
    <Authors>
      <Author Name="O'Leary, O'Leary" />
      <Author Name="MacFeather, MacFeather" />
    </Authors>
  </Title>
  <Title Name="You Can Combat Computer Stress!" Price="2.9900">
    <Authors>
      <Author Name="Green, Green" />
    </Authors>
  </Title>
</PubsDatabase>

Answer 1

Nodes will return things like text nodes as well as elements, basically. For example:

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace Test
{
    class Test
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            XElement element = new XElement("root",
                new XElement("child1", "text1"),
                "text directly in root",
                new XElement("child2"),
                new XElement("child3", "text3"));

            XElement child1 = element.Element("child1");
            var nodes = child1.NodesAfterSelf();
            foreach (var node in nodes)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(node.NodeType);
            }
        }
    }
}

This prints

Text
Element
Element

A few things to note:

• It’s not including the nodes within itself
• It’s not recursing (it doesn’t show the text node of child3)
• It does include the text node directly after it, which ElementsAfterSelf wouldn’t.

As a side note, attributes don’t count as nodes in LINQ to XML. From the XNode documentation:

Represents the abstract concept of a
node (one of: element, comment,
document type, processing instruction,
or text node) in the XML tree.

This is in contrast to most XML APIs.