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Is there any way to iterate through a XDocument when you dont know what the XML structure is (using c#)? There is plenty of examples when you know the structure, like the answer to this question : C# - Select XML Descendants with Linq and C# Foreach XML Node

I've tried Descendants("A") where A is the example below - which in my foreach returns me one element with the name as the root and the value as 'all of the values concatinated into one string'

The reason I'm doing this is to anonymize certain nodes which I know the names. The XDocument's I'm loading can be of any shape - so i've decided to just create a list which users can add to which contains these sensitive elements.

A solution I want to avoid is users creating XPath's for sensitive fields.

The XML is also sensitive so I cant share online literally but one example (out of 5) would look.

   <A>
     <B>
       <C>
         <D>
           <dee>value1</dee>
           <doo>value2</doo>
           <date>value3</date>
           <time>value4</time>
         </D>
       </C>
     </B>
     <E>
       ...ommited..this doc is 5000 lines long with 500~ unique node names
     </E>
     ............
     </A>

So is there a way to iterate without using Descendants?

EightSquared
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  • You can call `Descendants()` without providing an element name and it will iterate over every single element in the xml. – MarcinJuraszek Feb 27 '18 at 20:27
  • Unclear what you _do_ want. Of course you can iterate (recursively) using Elements. – H H Mar 02 '18 at 13:51

2 Answers2

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Use .Descendants() to iterate every element.

xmlDoc.Root.Descendants()
    .ToList()
    .ForEach(e => Console.WriteLine(e.Name));
Faruq
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0

This is the way I went about it.

Descendants means you know the structure of the nodes before hand. Even with an empty method call to descendants (which should get everything from the root) wasn't giving me what I was expecting.

The below code should work for any XML document, without knowing the structure. 

                XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                doc.Load(file);

                using (XmlReader reader = new XmlNodeReader(doc))
                {
                    while (reader.Read())
                    {
                        currentNodeName = reader.Name;
EightSquared
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  • So you went from XDocument to XmlDocument and use that only to create an XmlReader. Creating that reader directly could save a lot of RAM. – H H Mar 02 '18 at 13:53
  • I'm still not at the final solution yet so likely to change, and your right about keeping the doc in memory while only using the reader - noted and will bare in mind to change. I had answered my intial question of reading the nodes. – EightSquared Mar 02 '18 at 14:02