Home/ Questions/Q 45533
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T15:49:27+00:00

XmlElement.Attributes.Remove* methods are working fine for arbitrary attributes resulting in the removed attributes being

  • 0

XmlElement.Attributes.Remove* methods are working fine for arbitrary attributes resulting in the removed attributes being removed from XmlDocument.OuterXml property. Xmlns attribute however is different. Here is an example:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.InnerXml = @'<Element1 attr1=''value1'' xmlns=''http://mynamespace.com/'' attr2=''value2''/>'; doc.DocumentElement.Attributes.RemoveNamedItem('attr2'); Console.WriteLine('xmlns attr before removal={0}', doc.DocumentElement.Attributes['xmlns']); doc.DocumentElement.Attributes.RemoveNamedItem('xmlns'); Console.WriteLine('xmlns attr after removal={0}', doc.DocumentElement.Attributes['xmlns']);

The resulting output is

xmlns attr before removal=System.Xml.XmlAttribute xmlns attr after removal= <Element1 attr1='value1' xmlns='http://mynamespace.com/' />

The attribute seems to be removed from the Attributes collection, but it is not removed from XmlDocument.OuterXml. I guess it is because of the special meaning of this attribute.

The question is how to remove the xmlns attribute using .NET XML API. Obviously I can just remove the attribute from a String representation of this, but I wonder if it is possible to do the same thing using the API.

@Edit: I’m talking about .NET 2.0.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. .NET DOM API doesn’t support modifying element’s namespace which is what you are essentially trying to do. So, in order to solve your problem you have to construct a new document one way or another. You can use the same .NET DOM API and create a new element without specifying its namespace. Alternatively, you can create an XSLT stylesheet that transforms your original ‘namespaced’ document to a new one in which the elements will be not namespace-qualified.

    • 0