Reading XML file in C# with XpathNavigator

Question

I am trying to read the book.xml file provided as an example on the MSDN website.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<bookstore>
    <book genre="autobiography" publicationdate="1981-03-22" ISBN="1-861003-11-0">
        <title>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title>
        <author>
            <first-name>Benjamin</first-name>
            <last-name>Franklin</last-name>
        </author>
        <price>8.99</price>
    </book>
    <book genre="novel" publicationdate="1967-11-17" ISBN="0-201-63361-2">
        <title>The Confidence Man</title>
        <author>
            <first-name>Herman</first-name>
            <last-name>Melville</last-name>
        </author>
        <price>11.99</price>
    </book>
    <book genre="philosophy" publicationdate="1991-02-15" ISBN="1-861001-57-6">
        <title>The Gorgias</title>
        <author>
            <name>Plato</name>
        </author>
        <price>9.99</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

I have the following code until now:

static void Main()
        {
            XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
            document.Load(@"c:\books.xml");

            XPathNavigator navigator = document.CreateNavigator();

            XPathNodeIterator nodes = navigator.Select("/bookstore/book");


            while (nodes.MoveNext())
            {
                Console.WriteLine(nodes.Current.HasAttributes);
            }


        }

It seems this code is reading everything, but from here on if I want to display, say, just the titles of all book etc., how do I access them?

Answer 1

You can iterate over the titles if you change the XPath expression to select all title nodes:

XPathDocument document = new XPathDocument(@"c:\tmp\smpl5.xml");
XPathNavigator navigator = document.CreateNavigator();

XPathNodeIterator nodes = navigator.Select("/bookstore/book/title");

foreach (XPathNavigator item in nodes)
{
    Console.WriteLine(item.Value);
}

Note that you don't need to create an XmlDocument if you don't plan to modify the document. Using an XPathDocument is usually more light-weight.

Answer 2

you can also use this "//title" instead of "/bookstore/book"