Remove parent and children if all children are empty

Question

I am creating some XML files and I ran into a problem. I have tried to find other answers online but they have not helped.

I would like to remove the parent and child in a XML if all the children of said parent is empty. For example:

<client>
   <name>test</name>
   <adresses>
      <address>
         <adressname>test1</adressname>
         <adressplace>somewhere</adressplace>
      </address>
      <address>
         <adressname />
         <adressplace />
      </address>
   </adresses>
</client>

should become:

<client>
   <name>test</name>
   <adresses>
      <address>
         <adressname>test1</adressname>
         <adressplace>somewhere</adressplace>
      </address>
   </adresses>
</client>

The XML has a lot of tags that will be removed on different levels.

Does anyone have a good idea how to tackle this problem?

Answer 1

Please use the following function.

    private void RemoveNodesWithEmptyValue(XmlNode node)
    {
        if (node.ChildNodes.Count == 0)
        {
            if (node.Value == null)
            {
                node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node);
            }
        }
        else
        {
            int nCount = node.ChildNodes.Count;

            for (int i = nCount - 1; i >= 0; i--)
            {
                RemoveNodesWithEmptyValue(node.ChildNodes[i]);
            }

            if (node.ChildNodes.Count == 0)
            {
                if (node.Value == null)
                {
                    node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node);
                }
            }
        }
    }

With the following code, you can get the desired result.

// input xml string
string strXml = "..."; 

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml(strXml);
RemoveNodesWithEmptyValue(xmlDoc.DocumentElement);

string result = xmlDoc.OuterXml;

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Execution result: