Question

var count = (from p in xmlDoc.Descendants("env:SE04Overprinting")
select p).Count();

throws an exception (kind of, it crashes out when getting there, but using a watch shows this error)

xmlDoc.Descendants("env:SE04Overprinting")

‘”env:SE04Overprinting”‘ threw an exception of type ‘System.Xml.XmlException’ System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<System.Xml.Linq.XElement>

I did a bit of looking around on this error but didn’t find anything, then tried getting rid of the colon:

var count = (from p in xmlDoc.Descendants("env")
select p).Count();

this works. Is stripping the colons out of the file the only way around this?

Answer 1

If your XML properly declares the namespace you can do this:

XNamespace env = "http://namespaceinXml";
var count = (from p in xmlDoc.Descendants(env + "SE04Overprinting")...

Example:

<foo xmlns:env="http://foo.bar">
  <env:bar>test</env:bar>
</foo>

Since bar is within the env namespace you can retrieve its value like this:

XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load("test.xml");
XNamespace env = "http://foo.bar";
string bar = xdoc.Descendants(env+"bar").First().Value; //returns test

Make sure the XNamespace declaration matches exactly the value of the namespace within your XML.