XmlCrawler

This life purpose of this package is to simplify even more your life with XML files in C#. Let me show you how to use it. Let's assume you have a file called random_xml.xml in the same directory as the exemplified program.cs used here, with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<catalog>
   <book id="bk101">
      <author>Gambardella, Matthew</author>
      <title>XML Developer's Guide</title>
      <genre>Computer</genre>
      <price>44.95</price>
      <publish_date>2000-10-01</publish_date>
      <description>An in-depth look at creating applications 
      with XML.</description>
   </book>
</catalog>

In your program.cs, the first thing you need to do is to extract the xml string from our hipothetical file:

string xmlString = File.ReadAllText("./random_xml.xml");

Then you simply instantiates a new object of the XmlCrawler class passing the xmlString variable as an argument:

string xmlString = File.ReadAllText("./random_xml.xml");
XmlCrawler crawler = new(xmlString);

Or if for some reason, you already have an instance of XDocument, you can create an instance with it too:

string xmlString = File.ReadAllText("./random_xml.xml");
XDocument document = XDocument.Parse(xmlString);
XmlCrawler crawler = new(document);

You can check the current node in the crawler by checking the CurrentNode property.

From there, you can keep walking through the XML tags by using the FindNode method. Let's say we want to get to the book tag:

crawler.FindNode("book");
Console.WriteLine(crawler.CurrentNode.Name.LocalName); // book

Now, let's say we want to get the author's name from the book tag we just crawled in:

crawler.FindNode("book");
Console.WriteLine(crawler.GetChildValue("author")); // Gambardella, Matthew

Note: We need to crawl through all the parent elements first the get to the one we want. If we tried to use the FindNode method or the GetChildValue method while inside the catalog tag, the crawler would throw a NodeNotFoundException.

If we want to get back to the root element, we can simply use the Reset method:

crawler.FindNode("book");
Console.WriteLine(crawler.CurrentNode.Name.LocalName); // book

crawler.Reset();
Console.WriteLine(crawler.CurrentNode.Name.LocalName); // catalog

See? Although we made the crawler creep to the book element just like we wanted, after we reseted, it got back to the first element from the XML file.

Thanks for downloading the package, or simply reading through the whole documentation. I hope I manage to help you and if you have any suggestion, commentary or bug report, please, feel free to contact me.

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