I want to create an array containing my xmldocument nodes in c#

Question

Hello I have created an xml file with motivational quotations, and I want to read those quotations into an array.

Here is what my xml file looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
<MotivationalQuotes>
  <quotation>
    <quote>Life is about making an impact, not making an income</quote>
    <author>Kevin Kruse</author>
  </quotation>

  <quotation>
    <quote>Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve</quote>
    <author>Napoleon Hill</author>

  </quotation>

</MotivationalQuotes>

I am trying to store each individual quotation (without the author) into an array, so far I have the below code working - which creates a message box and iterates through the xml file displaying the text from each quotation.

1) How can I modify this code to create a string array, where each item in the array is a quotation (i.e. each item in the array is the contents that is currently being displayed to the messagebox in my foreach loop?

2) how do I return a random item from the array, once it is created?

3) As an extension to my question... my xml file only has motivational quotes in at the moment, but it will have more inspirational, funny etc... how can I specify to only include quotations into the array if they are inside the MotivationalQuotes tag.

Thanks for the help!

public void motivate()
            {
                XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                doc.Load("quotations.xml");
                XmlNode Node = doc.DocumentElement;

                foreach (XmlNode Node1 in Node.ChildNodes)
                {
                MessageBox.Show(Node1.FirstChild.InnerText);

                } 
            }

Answer 1

You should use XDocument and LINQ.

To get all quotes

using System.Xml.Linq;

var quotes = XDocument
 .Load("quotations.xml")
 .Descendants("quote")
 .Select(q => q.Value)
 .ToArray();