XPath select specific child elements

Question

Hi, If I have XML tree like this-

<Parent>
 <Image Name="a"/>
 <Image Name="b"/>
 <Child>
  <Image Name="c"/>
  <Image Name="d"/>
 </Child>
 <SomeElem>
  <Image Name="h"/>
  <Image Name="g"/>
 </SomeElem>
 <Image Name="e"/>
</Parent>

I want to select all <Image\> nodes except those listed inside <Child\> node. Currently I am using query to select all Image nodes, -

xElement.XPathSelectElements("//ns:Image", namespace);

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you only want to select those at the root level, then you can just do:

xElement.XPathSelectElements("/ns:Image", namespace);

The // tells the xpath engine to look at all Image nodes, no matter their depth.

Answer 2

/ns:Parent/ns:Image should do the trick