Parse generic XML string using C#

Question

suppose I have the following XML string:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<items>
  <item1>value1</item1>
  <item2>value2</item2>
  <item3>value3</item3>
  <item4>value4</item4>
  <item5>value5</item5>
  <item6>value6</item6>
</items>

I need to parse it in a generic way as it may be updated later, and I don't need to modify my code accordingly. So I have tried the following:

public static Dictionary<string, string> Parser(string xmlString)
{
    Dictionary<string, string> parserDictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    using (StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(xmlString))
    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(stringReader))
    {
           // Parse the file and display each of the nodes.
            while (reader.Read())
            {
                switch (reader.NodeType)
                {
                    case XmlNodeType.Element:
                        parserDictionary.Add(reader.Name, reader.ReadString());
                        break;

                }
            }
    }

    return parserDictionary;      
}

This code have 2 issues:

1. It parse the <items> element with null value, I don't need to parse it
2. it ignores <item1>

please advise

Answer 1

If you need to convert XML to an object representation than that's trivially easy

XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xmlString);

That's really all you need to do. Once you do that, you can query your xDoc with the Elements, Element, Attribute, Attributes and Descendants Properties.

---

For an example, here's some code that will print all of your values

XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xmlString);

foreach(XElement e in xDoc.Elements())
{
    Console.WriteLine(e.Value);
}

Answer 2

Why not something like this:

var parserDictionary = XDocument.Create(xmlString)
    .Descendants("items")
    .Elements()
    .Select(elem => new { Name = elem.Name.LocalName, Value = elem.Value })
    .ToDictionary(k => k.Name, v => v.Value);

You could probably even do this:

var parserDictionary = XDocument.Create(xmlString)
    .Descendants("items")
    .Elements()
    .ToDictionary(k => k.Name.LocalName, v => v.Value);