Calling the DescendantNodes without repeating each node

Question

I have an xml that I would like to get all of its elements. I tried getting those elements by Descendants() or DescendantNodes(), but both of them returned me repeated nodes

For example, here is my xml:

<Root xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
      xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"&gt;
  <FirstElement xsi:type="myType">
    <SecondElement>A</SecondElement> 
  </FirstElement>
</Root>

and when I use this snippet:

 XElement Elements = XElement.Parse(XML);
 IEnumerable<XElement> xElement = Elements.Descendants();
 IEnumerable<XNode> xNodes = Elements.DescendantNodes();
 foreach (XNode node in xNodes )
 {
     stringBuilder.Append(node);
 }

it gives me two nodes but repeating the <SecondElement>. I know Descendants call its children, and children of a child all the time, but is there any other way to avoid it?

Then, this is the content of my stringBuilder:

<FirstElement xsi:type="myType"  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"&gt;
   <SecondElement>A</SecondElement> 
</FirstElement>

<SecondElement>A</SecondElement>

Answer 1

Well do you actually want all the descendants or just the top-level elements? If you only want the top level ones, then use the Elements() method - that returns all the elements directly under the current node.

The problem isn't that nodes are being repeated - it's that the higher-level nodes include the lower level nodes. So the higher-level node is being returned, then the lower-level one, and you're writing out the whole of both of those nodes, which means you're writing out the lower-level node twice.

If you just write out, say, the name of the node you're looking at, you won't see a problem. But you haven't said what you're really trying to do, so I don't know if that helps...

Answer 2

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(XML);
XmlNodeList allElements = doc.SelectNodes("//*");
foreach(XmlElement element in allElements)
{
  // your code here
}