How do I retrieve element text inside CDATA markup via XPath?

Question

Consider the following xml fragment:

How do I retrieve the

Answer 1

/Obj/Name/text() is the XPath to return the content of the CDATA markup.

What threw me off was the behavior of the Value property. For an XMLNode (DOM world), the XmlNode.Value property of an Element (with CDATA or otherwise) returns Null. The InnerText property would give you the CDATA/Text content. If you use Xml.Linq, XElement.Value returns the CDATA content.

string sXml = @"
";

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml( sXml );
XmlNamespaceManager nsMgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);

Console.WriteLine(@"XPath = /object/name" );
WriteNodesToConsole(xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/object/name", nsMgr));

Console.WriteLine(@"XPath = /object/name/text()" );
WriteNodesToConsole( xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/object/name/text()", nsMgr) );

Console.WriteLine(@"Xml.Linq = obRoot.Elements(""name"")");
XElement obRoot = XElement.Parse( sXml );
WriteNodesToConsole( obRoot.Elements("name") );

Output:

XPath = /object/name
        NodeType = Element
        Value = 
        OuterXml = 
        InnerXml = 
        InnerText = SomeText

        NodeType = Element
        Value = 
        OuterXml = OtherName
        InnerXml = OtherName
        InnerText = OtherName

XPath = /object/name/text()
        NodeType = CDATA
        Value = SomeText
        OuterXml = 
        InnerXml =
        InnerText = SomeText

        NodeType = Text
        Value = OtherName
        OuterXml = OtherName
        InnerXml =
        InnerText = OtherName

Xml.Linq = obRoot.Elements("name")
        Value = SomeText
        Value = OtherName

Turned out the author of Visual XPath had a TODO for the CDATA type of XmlNodes. A little code snippet and I have CDATA support now.

MainForm.cs

private void Xml2Tree( TreeNode tNode, XmlNode xNode)
{
   ...
   case XmlNodeType.CDATA:
      //MessageBox.Show("TODO: XmlNodeType.CDATA");
      // Gishu                    
      TreeNode cdataNode = new TreeNode("![CDATA[" + xNode.Value + "]]");
      cdataNode.ForeColor = Color.Blue;
      cdataNode.NodeFont = new Font("Tahoma", 12);
      tNode.Nodes.Add(cdataNode);
      //Gishu
      break;