C#: How to write an XML document

This article shows how to use ‘System.Xml’ to read and write xml into a string.

Write xml into a String

First of all, we will use this following namespaces:

using System.Xml; // for XmlTextWriter
using System.IO; // for StringWriter

Then, to create easily a xml document, we will use XmlTextWriter. Here is a code example:

static private String CreateXmlString()
{
// create a string writer:
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();

// create a XML writer:
XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter);
xmlTextWriter.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;

// Start document
xmlTextWriter.WriteStartDocument();

// Start Element
xmlTextWriter.WriteStartElement("MainElement");

xmlTextWriter.WriteStartElement("Element1");
xmlTextWriter.WriteAttributeString("name", "myElement1Name");
xmlTextWriter.WriteAttributeString("type", "myElement1Type");

xmlTextWriter.WriteStartElement("SubElement1");
xmlTextWriter.WriteAttributeString("Id", "5");
xmlTextWriter.WriteEndElement();

xmlTextWriter.WriteEndElement();

xmlTextWriter.WriteStartElement("Element2");
xmlTextWriter.WriteAttributeString("name", "myElement2Name");
xmlTextWriter.WriteAttributeString("type", "myElement2Type");
xmlTextWriter.WriteValue(10.23);
xmlTextWriter.WriteEndElement();

// Close main Element
xmlTextWriter.WriteEndElement();

xmlTextWriter.Flush();
xmlTextWriter.Close();
stringWriter.Flush();

return stringWriter.ToString();
}

The returned string will be like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<MainElement>
<Element1 name="myElement1Name" type="myElement1Type">
<SubElement1 Id="5" />
</Element1>
<Element2 name="myElement2Name" type="myElement2Type">10.23</Element2>
</MainElement>

Parse our xml string

Now we can use XmlDocument to parse our XML string:

String strValue = CreateXmlString();
XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml(strValue);
XmlElement rootElement = xmlDoc.DocumentElement;
foreach (XmlElement elem in rootElement.ChildNodes)
{
// etc...
}

C#: How to write an XML document

Write xml into a String

Parse our xml string

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