Question

We are interested in finding maximum number of attributes a node has in a XML document. My code is below using C#:

        XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
        xmlDoc.Load(@"C:\ABC.xml");
        XmlNode root = xmlDoc.DocumentElement;

        int nodeAttrCount = 0;
        foreach (XmlNode node in root)                            
            if (nodeAttrCount < node.Attributes.Count)
                nodeAttrCount = node.Attributes.Count;

We are interested is: do we have any thing better than this. Like any method or property which give us the same result or anyother option.

Answer 1

You can also use LINQ to XML:

XElement el = XElement.Load("MyXML.xml");
int maxAttr = el.DescendantNodesAndSelf().OfType<XElement>().Max(x => x.Attributes().Count());

The above code traverses all the xml nodes (it works with nested nodes too) and get the maximum number of attributes.

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For .net 2.0:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load("MyXML.xml");
int max = 0;
foreach (XmlNode xmlNode in doc.SelectNodes("//*"))
   if (max < node.Attributes.Count)
       max = node.Attributes.Count;

This is basically the same as your solution;
the main difference is that it considers all nodes at every nesting level (using XPath navigation).