Get 3 branch of each branching node

Question

I want to get the 3rd node of a branching node. Example

<rows>
    <row>
        <cell>a</cell>
        <cell>b</cell>
        <cell>c</cell>
        <cell>d</cell>
        <cell>e</cell>
        <cell>f</cell></row>
    <row>
        <cell>aa</cell>
        <cell>bb</cell>
        <cell>cc</cell>
        <cell>dd</cell>
        <cell>ee</cell>
        <cell>ff</cell>
    </row>
......
</rows>

I basically want to get item c and cc and so on out. Basically the third cell element in rows. This is what i have. However what i want are the values of the items not the xml.

var Study = XDocument.Load(XmlReader.Create(studyStream));

var rows = Study.Descendants("row");
foreach (var item in rows)
{
    var cells = item.Descendants("cell");
    string id = null;
    foreach (var items in cells)
    {
        id = items.Parent.FirstNode.NextNode.NextNode.ToString();
    }

    Console.WriteLine(id);
}

Console.Read();

Is there a way to do this properly? Thank you for all your help.

Kevin

Answer 1

Well, you can do something like:

var xdoc = XDocument.Load(@"your_file.xml");
foreach (var children in xdoc.XPathSelectElements("rows/row"))
{
    var thirdChild = children.Elements().Skip(2).Take(1).FirstOrDefault();
    if (thirdChild != null)
        Console.WriteLine(thirdChild.Value);
}

Here we first selecting /row element and then for each such a row we selecting third child's value.

This valued collection can be also obtained without foreach loop, only by linq query like:

var values = xdoc.XPathSelectElements("rows/row")
                 .Select(row => row.Elements().Skip(2).Take(1).First().Value);