A few questions about XmlTextWriter

Question

I am new to editing XML and I have a few questions to problems I'm running into.

First: how do I add new lines after each writer.WriteEndElement();. I found examples using writer.WriteWhitespace("\n"); but it doesn't seem to make any new lines.

Second: I think this may not be doing anything because of the previous problem but i wanted to indent my code using this at the end: writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;, but it doesn't seem to do anything (most likely because i have no new lines).

Third: Since I'm appending this to a previous file i stripped out the closing tag for my main parent so that i could add this new data. I was hoping i could just have a writer.WriteEndElement(); to close the final tag but since i dont create an opening tag when im writing it doesn't seem to realize that there's an open tag. Is there an good way to do this or should i just end in code to write </closingTagName> at the end of the file.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this:

using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter())
using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter))
{
    writer.WriteRaw("</closingTagName>");

    writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
    writer.Indentation = 10;
    writer.WriteStartElement("Element1");

    writer.WriteStartElement("Element2");
    writer.WriteString("test");
    writer.WriteEndElement();

    writer.WriteEndElement();

    writer.WriteWhitespace(Environment.NewLine);

    writer.WriteStartElement("Element3");
    writer.WriteEndElement();

    var result = stringWriter.ToString();

Result:

</closingTagName>  -- Closing tag
<Element1>
          <Element2>test</Element2>  -- Line with the ident 10.
</Element1>
              -- extra new line
<Element3 />