How can I transform XML into a List or String[]?

Question

How can I transform the following XML into a List or String[]:

  1
  2<         


        

Answer 1

It sounds like you're more after just parsing rather than full XML serialization/deserialization. If you can use LINQ to XML, this is pretty easy:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;

public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string xml = "12";

        XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);

        var list = doc.Root.Elements("id")
                           .Select(element => element.Value)
                           .ToList();

        foreach (string value in list)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(value);
        }
    }
}

In fact the call to Elements could omit the argument as there are only id elements, but I thought I'd demonstrate how to specify which elements you want.

Likewise I'd normally not bother calling ToList unless I really needed a List - without it, the result is IEnumerable which is fine if you're just iterating over it once. To create an array instead, use ToArray.