Question

This is my xml file

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<catalog>
   <book id="bk101">
      <author>Gambardella, Matthew</author>
      <title>XML Developer's Guide</title>
      <genre>Computer</genre>
      <price>44.95</price>
      <publish_date>2000-10-01</publish_date>
      <description>An in-depth look at creating applications 
      with XML.</description>
   </book>
</catalog>

And I need read the author name so this is what I do:

XmlNodeList bookList = doc.GetElementsByTagName("book");

foreach (XmlNode node in bookList)
{
    XmlElement bookElement = (XmlElement)node;

    string title = bookElement.GetElementsByTagName("title")[0].InnerText;
    string author = bookElement.GetElementsByTagName("author")[0].InnerText;

    string isbn = "";
    if (bookElement.HasAttributes)
    {
        isbn = ""; 
        ;    //bookElement.Attributes["ISBN"].InnerText
    }

    Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1}) is written by {2}\n", title, isbn, author);
}

I do not like to use a for loop even though I surely know that it would run only once. Is there a much cleaner method of doing this?

Answer 1

The “modern” way to do this without for loops is to write code using LINQ to XML.

This code will work if you are sure there is at least 1 book in the XML file. It creates an anonymous type with 3 properties, Id, Author, and Title.

using System.Linq; // requires assembly reference to System.Core.dll
using System.Xml.Linq; // requires assembly reference to System.Xml.Linq.dll

// ...

XDocument document = XDocument.Load("yourfile.xml");
var book =
    (from b in document.Descendants("book")
    select new
    {
        Id = b.Attribute("id").Value,
        Author = b.Element("author").Value,
        Title = b.Element("title").Value
    }).First();