asked on

Find a path of each XML element

I'm looping through XML elements like this:

            Dim s as String
            Dim xml As New Xml.XmlTextReader(xLocationAndXMLfileName)
            While xml.Read
                If xml.NodeType = XmlNodeType.Element Then
                    MsgBox("path of the element "+xml.Name+" is: "+s)
                End If
            End While

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I would like to find a way that for each found element the program prints all its parents. For the XML file below I expect the program to return the following result:

-------------XML file-------------
<main>
<first>text1</first>
<second>text2</second>
<abc>
<title>text3</title>
</abc>
</main>
------------------------------------

-----------Expected result-----------
path of the element main is:
path of the element first is: /main/first
path of the element second is: /main/second
path of the element title is: /main/abc/title
------------------------------------------

The question is how to define the value of variable ‘s’ in algorithm to achieve result expected?

jayakrishnabh

Dim doc As XDocument = XDocument.Load("C:\Users\jharikrishna\Desktop\Noname2.xml")
Dim nde As String = "\" + doc.Root.Name.LocalName
For Each node As XElement In doc.Root.Descendants()

      If node.HasElements Then
            nde += "\" + node.Name
      Else
            Console.WriteLine((nde & "\") + node.Name)
            nde = "\" + doc.Root.Name.LocalName

      End If
Next

Fernando Soto

Hi JanjaNovak;

A small correction to the post by jayakrishnabh. You will need to add the ToString() method to the two places where you see node.Name otherwise you will see an exception like this, "Operator '+' is not defined for types 'String' and 'System.Xml.Linq.XName'." the code below has the corrections.

Dim doc As XDocument = XDocument.Load("C:\Users\jharikrishna\Desktop\Noname2.xml")
Dim nde As String = "\" + doc.Root.Name.LocalName
For Each node As XElement In doc.Root.Descendants()
    If node.HasElements Then
          nde += "\" + node.Name.ToString()
    Else
          Console.WriteLine((nde & "\") + node.Name.ToString())
          nde = "\" + doc.Root.Name.LocalName
    End If
Next

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JanjaNovak

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JanjaNovak

ASKER

Since I haven't received a better solution I had to write function by my own.