How to read XML data using C#

Question

So here's the XML document:

<Ticket>
    <Tickets>
        <Destination>America</Destination>
        <Destination>Italy</Destination>
        <Destination>China</Destination>
    </Tickets>
</Ticket>

In my exercises, it was pretty easy to find out what the destination was, you just make a string like

string xmlString = "Tickets/Ticket/*" 

and run it like so...

But now...

How would I find the price and location of this:

    <Ticket> 
   <Tickets>
     <Destination location ="America">520</Destination>
     <Destination location ="Italy">420</Destination>
     <Destination location ="China">320</Destination>
   </Tickets>
</Ticket>

Finding the price is easy, same as above (first example)... But how do I find what the location is inside that destination tag?

My college gave me exercises like the first example, easy... But when I got to my exam it was similar to the 2nd example... But I don't know what to do? My exam is long done now, so this isn't "cheating" or anything, I'm just curious... Please help? :)

PS: I'm using Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate and coding using C# and using console application, not windows forms... Well, I could use forms but ya... Console is quicker...

Answer 1

Your XML is not valid. You are missing attribute in Destination element. Assuming you want to read something similar to below:

<Ticket>
 <Tickets>
    <Destination location= "America">520</Destination>
    <Destination location= "Italy">420</Destination>
    <Destination location="China">320</Destination>
  </Tickets>
</Ticket>

You can do it through XmlTextReader:

var reader = new XmlTextReader(@"Data.xml");
while (reader.Read()) {
 reader.MoveToContent();
 if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && reader.Name == "Destination") {
 Console.WriteLine(reader.GetAttribute("location"));
 }
}

Answer 2

So this works:

static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            XmlTextReader xReader = new XmlTextReader(@"../../Ticket.xml");
            //xReader.WhitespaceHandling = WhitespaceHandling.None;
            XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
            xDoc.Load(xReader);
            //XmlNodeList xNodeList = xDoc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//Ticket/Tickets/@*");
            XmlNodeList elemList = xDoc.GetElementsByTagName("Destination");
                for (int i = 0; i < elemList.Count; i++)
                    {
                        string attrVal = elemList[i].Attributes["location"].Value;
                        string elemVal = elemList[i].InnerText.ToString();
                        Console.WriteLine("Location: " + attrVal + " " + "Price: " + elemVal);
                        Console.ReadLine();
                    }  
        }

Answer 3

In addition to the rest of the answers I will add the following - C# offers four different ways of parsing and handling XML data:

• LINQ to XML
• XmlDocument
• XPathNavigator
• XmlTextReader

I suggest you read a little bit about all four in order to decide which one you need. They do differ in terms of performance (speed when handling large XML files, memory footprint etc.). XmlDocument and XPath are DOM-based parsing tools, which means that the XML is loaded in your RAM by creating a XML tree with all the objects and their attributes in there. This leads to two things - increased memory footprint when handling large XML documents (approx. 1:10 ration with 1=diskspace the file requires and 10=memory space the DOM requires) but at the same time you can traverse the tree as any tree out there, access all its elements without a problem and so on. XmlReader on the other hand is used to handle XML data in a streaming manner - you parse an element and then, if you haven't stored the data yourself, it's gone. You cannot jump backwards (in this case you have to start over and then iterate until you reach the desired predecessor) and you cannot access a successor directly (unless it's really a direct successor) without iterating through all elements in-between. Speed-wise there have been many discussions but I find all the solutions fast enough for the usual XML-stuff you do in your everyday life. The only big issue one might have is the memory footprint each one produces. Considering the structure of your XML I'd go for the XmlReader.