ARTICLE

XML Parser in C#

Posted by Sanjay Ahuja Articles | XML April 30, 2002
This project gives you a head start to write XML parser in C#.
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This project gives you a head start to write XML parser in C#. The important namespace to achieve our goal would be System.Xml. Though you might find it strange, unlike other languages/class libraries their are no direct functions like startElement and endElement at your rescue. You will have to manage all this on your own. So lets start looking at this important block of the code

void ParseURL(string strUrl)
{
try
{
XmlTextReader reader =
new XmlTextReader(strUrl);
while (reader.Read())
{
switch (reader.NodeType)
{
case XmlNodeType.Element:
Hashtable attributes =
new Hashtable();
string strURI= reader.NamespaceURI;
string strName= reader.Name;
if (reader.HasAttributes)
{
for (int i = 0; i < reader.AttributeCount; i++)
{
reader.MoveToAttribute(i);
attributes.Add(reader.Name,reader.Value);
}
}
StartElement(strURI,strName,strName,attributes);
break;
//
//you can handle other cases here
//
//case XmlNodeType.EndElement:
// Todo
//case XmlNodeType.Text:
// Todo
default:
break;
}
}
catch (XmlException e)
{
Console.WriteLine("error occured: " + e.Message);
}
}

As we see the main class here is XmlTextReader. XmlTextReader provides forward-only, read-only access to a stream of XML data. The current node refers to the node on which the reader is positioned. The reader is advanced using any of the read methods and properties reflect the value of the current node. Note that we cache the element name before we move to the attributes.

NodeType property of XmlTextReader  gets the type of the current node. Accordingly we process the node and call necessary functions on it.

You can forward me your comments at lparam@hotmail.com.

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Thank you  !

Posted by Simple Calm Jan 17, 2010

If you have a schema and wish to parse out XML in a well-structured format, I would suggest using XmlSerializer. See my posting here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/nicexmlparsing.aspx

Posted by Joseph Armbruster Mar 02, 2008
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