SelectSingleNode without namespace

Question

I'm using .Net 2.0, and need to SelectSingleNode from my XmlDocument regardless of namespace, as wrong headed as that may sound.

to be specific

XmlElement slipType = (XmlElement)document.SelectSingleNode("//Provenance1");

will set slipType to null since I don'l know th namespace Provenance1 is in at the time of the query.

Answer 1

Try:

XmlElement slipType = (XmlElement)document.SelectSingleNode("//*:Provenance1");

Or:

XmlElement slipType = (XmlElement)document.SelectSingleNode("//@*:Provenance1");

for attributes...

Unfortunately, this construction would only work with XPath 2.0, while .NET uses only XPath 1.0. I accidently tested above code with a 2.0 parser, so it doesn't work.)

Answer 2

You can check the local-name of the element and ignore namespace with the following XPath expression:

//*[local-name()='Provenance1']