Retrieve Value from Xml file C#

Question

I have an XML file which contains following lines

<string name="accept">Accept</string>
<string name="action_settings">Settings</string>
<string name="app_name">Val</string>

How can I get value of app_name string which is Val in C#. I tried XML parser but it doesn't work.

did you try this ?: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/642293/how-do-i-read-and-parse-an-xml-file-in-c — , Sep 06 '17 at 17:39
Show us your entire XML structure. What you posted isn't enough. — Sam Axe, Sep 06 '17 at 17:40
Full xml contains same such things string name something and some value... — Kaustubh Patange, Sep 06 '17 at 17:44
No not a duplicate of that ... That xml layout is very much different than this... — Kaustubh Patange, Sep 06 '17 at 17:45
take a look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8898121/select-elements-with-the-name-attribute-name-in-special-xml-structure — Sparrow, Sep 06 '17 at 18:07
"That xml layout is very much different than this" - the expectation is that you do research and amend existing solutions as required. Stack Overflow isn't about handing you answers on a plate without you doing research. — Jon Skeet, Sep 06 '17 at 18:14
@KaustubhPatange _it doesn't work_ is not a good way to ask a question. You should show what you did, and _in what way_ it doesn't work. Then we can help. — Sach, Sep 06 '17 at 18:16

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 06 '17 at 19:27

You can use XmlDocument and an XPath statement in the SelectSingleNode method to retrieve this information. Here is an example:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(xml);
var accept = doc.SelectSingleNode("//string[@name='accept']").InnerText;
var actionSettings = doc.SelectSingleNode("//string[@name='action_settings']").InnerText;
var appName = doc.SelectSingleNode("//string[@name='app_name']").InnerText;

Here is a tutorial on XPath syntax: https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_syntax.asp

UPDATE: @jon-skeet suggested using LINQ. Should you choose to do that, your code might look something like:

var element = XElement.Parse(xml);
var accept = element.Descendants("string").Where(x => x.Attribute("name").Value == "accept").Select(x => x.Value).FirstOrDefault();
var actionSettings = element.Descendants("string").Where(x => x.Attribute("name").Value == "action_settings").Select(x => x.Value).FirstOrDefault();
var appName = element.Descendants("string").Where(x => x.Attribute("name").Value == "app_name").Select(x => x.Value).FirstOrDefault();

I'd *strongly* encourage using LINQ to XML instead of XmlDocument, and only using XPath when you really need to - I see no benefit in doing that here. The result is fiddly and error-prone code. — Jon Skeet, Sep 06 '17 at 18:15
@JonSkeet LINQ would work fine as well, I've updated the response to include a code sample of that approach. — David Kujawski, Sep 06 '17 at 18:28

Retrieve Value from Xml file C#

1 Answers1