Finding element in XDocument?

Question

I have a simple XML

  
    greatest Band
            


        

Answer 1

My experience when working with large & complicated XML files is that sometimes neither Elements nor Descendants seem to work in retrieving a specific Element (and I still do not know why).

In such cases, I found that a much safer option is to manually search for the Element, as described by the following MSDN post:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/3d457c3b-292c-49e1-9fd4-9b6a950f9010/how-to-get-tag-name-of-xml-by-using-xdocument?forum=csharpgeneral

In short, you can create a GetElement function:

private XElement GetElement(XDocument doc,string elementName)
{
    foreach (XNode node in doc.DescendantNodes())
    {
        if (node is XElement)
        {
            XElement element = (XElement)node;
            if (element.Name.LocalName.Equals(elementName))
                return element;
        }
    }
    return null;
}

Which you can then call like this:

XElement element = GetElement(doc,"Band");

Note that this will return null if no matching element is found.