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Strange behaviour XmlDocument.LoadXML and GetElementByID, how to delcare string with quotation mark

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+3 A:

You need to include a DOCTYPE declaration if you want to use the GetElementById method. It is because the function doesn't know what ID means for the given XML. In your case you are using XHTML, so you need to specify that when you want to find an element by id this means find a node that has an attribute named "id":

string webPageStr = @"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ""-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"" ""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd""&gt;&lt;html&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;div id=""content"">good content</div><div id=""badcontent"">bad content</div></body></html>";
XmlDocument webPage = new XmlDocument();
webPage.LoadXml(webPageStr);
XmlElement divElement = webPage.GetElementById("content");

This first approach means that you need web access to the DOCTYPE declaration when running your code (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd)

An alternative approach would be to use XPATH expression:

string webPageStr = @"<html><body><div id=""content"">good content</div><div id=""badcontent"">bad content</div></body></html>";
XmlDocument webPage = new XmlDocument();
webPage.LoadXml(webPageStr);
XmlNode divElement = webPage.SelectSingleNode("//div[@id=\"content\"]");

Darin Dimitrov 2009-03-07 12:36:38

Thanks it's working :)

ksirg 2009-03-07 12:41:21

+1. The attribute name “id” is nothing special to an XML document unless a schema tells it otherwise. (“xml:id” might be, but that's not an [X]HTML attribute...)

bobince 2009-03-07 13:05:14

If you use apostrophes instead of quotes to delimit your XPath string literals, you won't have to escape them.

Robert Rossney 2009-03-07 17:54:13

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Strange behaviour XmlDocument.LoadXML and GetElementByID, how to delcare string with quotation mark

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