How can I make the xmlserializer only serialize plain xml?

Question

I need to get plain xml, without the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> at the beginning and xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" in first element from XmlSerializer. How can I do it?

Answer 1

You can use XmlWriterSettings and set the property OmitXmlDeclaration to true as described in the msdn. Then use the XmlSerializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, objectToSerialize) as described here.

Answer 2

Use the XmlSerializer.Serialize method overload where you can specify custom namespaces and pass there this.

var emptyNs = new XmlSerializerNamespaces(new[] { XmlQualifiedName.Empty });
serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, objectToSerialze, emptyNs);

passing null or empty array won't do the trick

Answer 3

To put this all together - this works perfectly for me:

    // To Clean XML
    public string SerializeToString(T value)
    {
        var emptyNamepsaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces(new[] { XmlQualifiedName.Empty });
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(value.GetType());
        var settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
        settings.Indent = true;
        settings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true;

        using (var stream = new StringWriter())
        using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(stream, settings))
        {
            serializer.Serialize(writer, value, emptyNamepsaces);
            return stream.ToString();
        }
    }