Remove empty XML tags

Question

I am looking for a good approach that can remove empty tags from XML efficiently. What do you recommend? Regex? XDocument? XmlTextReader?

For example,

Answer 1

As always, it depends on your requirements.

Do you know how the empty tag will display? (e.g. , , etc.) I usually do not recommend using Regular Expressions (they are really useful but at the same time they are evil). Also considering a string.Replace approach seems to be problematic unless your XML doesn't have a certain structure.

Finally, I would recommend using an XML parser approach (make sure your code is valid XML).

var doc = XDocument.Parse(original);
var emptyElements = from descendant in doc.Descendants()
                    where descendant.IsEmpty || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(descendant.Value)
                    select descendant;
emptyElements.Remove();