C#•2y ago

Getting the Value of XElement including tags

I have an XElement and I want to get its value, including any child elements of it expressed as tags.
So for example, I have

<test>1<a>2</a>3</test>

<test>1<a>2</a>3</test>

And I want to get

1<a>2</a>3

1<a>2</a>3

as a string.
What's an easy way to do that?

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 5:26 AM

this is invalid xml

TTeBeCo this is invalid xml

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 5:39 AM

Then it's a bad example I guess. Idk enough of the xml standard to see why that's wrong.
This is the real xml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EverestAPI/Everest/dev/lib-stripped/Celeste.xml
I'll have an XElement for one of the <member> elements and I want to get anything inside it

dance?•6/5/24, 5:55 AM

XmlDocument has InnerXml for a node, in XElement there should be something similar
maybe you can do node.ToString()?

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 5:57 AM

Hmm, ToString() kind of works. I could take all the child nodes, ToString them and concat together

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 5:58 AM

I could also switch to XmlDocument tbh

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:06 AM

if you know the XML schena ahead ... create proper type and class

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:06 AM

and deserialize

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:07 AM

don't rely on XML DOM scanning

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:07 AM

just deserialize

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:07 AM

the one you sent is just a List<T>

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:08 AM

with T having

name

name

and

summary

summary

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:08 AM

both being string

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:08 AM

there's absolutly nothing fancy at all in that XML

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:09 AM

i bet you can nearly select it all

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:09 AM

copy

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:09 AM

and use "Paste as XML" in VS

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:09 AM

which will generate ~80% to 90% of the C# code

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:10 AM

yup, juste did it

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:10 AM

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:10 AM

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:11 AM

alternatively because this XML is the typical summary comment extracted to XML

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:11 AM

i might even bet there's already a deserializer for that

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:11 AM

because reading these files are generally a common thing for website doc generator

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:11 AM

TLDR: might not have to re-invent the wheel

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 6:19 AM

Might be, although it seems like your first suggestion wouldn't let me take the innerXML (or equivalent) as a string

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 6:19 AM

I did a little research into the second option when I started this but didn't find anything immediate, I'll check a little harder though

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:23 AM

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/xmldoc/

Documentation comments - document APIs using /// comments - C# refe...

Learn about documentation comments. You can create documentation for your code by including XML elements in special comment fields. You can use other tools to build documentation layouts from comments.

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:23 AM

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:23 AM

i would look at existing open source softare

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:23 AM

and start from that

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:24 AM

either just use them of fork or extract code

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:24 AM

all that verifying their license allow that

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:25 AM

DocFx has a nuget

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 6:25 AM

i'm letting you check the rest of it

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 7:03 AM

Yeah, so I took a look at DocFx, they're just using XElement and have a ton of code that I don't need at all for my use-case. I ended up just switching my existing approach to XmlDocument and it seems to work pretty well

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 7:14 AM

what i'm saying is try to just use their package

TeBeCo•6/5/24, 7:14 AM

especially if they do all the parsing and extraction

BrokemiaOP•6/5/24, 7:22 AM

I'm not sure what the benefit would I be since my approach is already working, and their code is tailored to their use case and would need to be altered a bunch