How to perform xmlparsing using xmlreader for a particular section

Question

The XML file structure is like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <Application>
          <Tabs>
             <Tab name="1">
               <title>abcd</title>
               <description>xyz</description>
             </Tab>
             <Tab name="2">
               <title>abcde</title>
               <description>xyzw</description>
             </Tab>
          </Tabs>
         <Files>
         </Files>
    </Application>

I would like to read only the Tabs section using XmlReader in asp.net 2.0. The values that I'm interested in are the title and description contents. There are in total 7 tabs which can increase also later on. Hence can't iterate over a count variable with value fixed.

Answer 1

If you can use XPathDocument, you can try something like this.

Note: If you already have a XmlReader instance, instead of using StringReader, you can use the constructor overload that take XmlReader.

string xml = @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""UTF-8""?>
<Application>
      <Tabs>
         <Tab name=""1"">
           <title>abcd</title>
           <description>xyz</description>
         </Tab>
         <Tab name=""2"">
           <title>abcd</title>
           <description>xyzw</description>
         </Tab>
      </Tabs>
     <Files>
     </Files>
</Application>";

string xpath = "/Application/Tabs/Tab/description";

XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument(new StringReader(xml));
XPathNavigator nav = doc.CreateNavigator();
XPathNodeIterator nodeIterator = nav.Select(xpath);

foreach (XPathNavigator item in nodeIterator)
{
    Console.WriteLine(item.Value);
}