Parsing iTunes Podcast XML in C# using System.Xml

Question

I'm trying to parse a iTunes podcast XML feed in C# and am having trouble. It successfully downloads the feed and puts it into the XmlDocument object (tested). After that, it goes to the for-each line, but never enters the loop. I have no idea why it's saying that there aren't any elements in channel/item (at least that's what I'm thinking at this time). Heres the code:

    string _returnedXMLData;
    XmlDocument _podcastXmlData = new XmlDocument();

    public List<PodcastItem> PodcastItemsList = new List<PodcastItem> ();

    _podcastXmlData.Load(@"http://thepointjax.com/Podcast/podcast.xml");

    string title = string.Empty;
    string subtitle = string.Empty;
    string author = string.Empty;

    foreach (XmlNode node in _podcastXmlData.SelectNodes(@"channel/item")) {
        title = node.SelectSingleNode (@"title").InnerText;
        subtitle = node.SelectSingleNode (@"itunes:subtitle").InnerText;
        author = node.SelectSingleNode (@"itunes:author").InnerText;
        PodcastItemsList.Add (new PodcastItem(title, subtitle, author));
    }
}

Thank you in advance for any assistance! It's much appreciated!

Kirkland

Answer 1

Going off my comment, I'd just use XDocument:

 var xml = XDocument.Load("http://thepointjax.com/Podcast/podcast.xml");

 XNamespace ns = "http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd";
 foreach (var item in xml.Descendants("item"))
 {
     var title = item.Element("title").Value;
     var subtitle = item.Element(ns + "subtitle").Value;
     var author = item.Element(ns + "author").Value;

     PodcastItemsList.Add (new PodcastItem(title, subtitle, author));
 }

itunes is a namespace in the XML, so you need to use an XNamespace to account for it.