How to select Nodes in XML correctly?-CodePudding

i have following XML-File

  <?xml version="1.0" ?>
<server xmlns="exampleServer">  
    <system-properties>
        <property name="prop0" value="null"/>
        <property name="prop1" value="true"/>
        <property name="prop2" value="false"/>
    </system-properties>    
</server>

and this.Code:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(path);
XmlElement root = doc.DocumentElement;            
XmlNodeList nodeList = root.SelectNodes("//system-properties/property");

But nodeList.Count are always 0. I have tried

root.SelectNodes("/system-properties/property");
root.SelectNodes("system-properties/property");
root.SelectNodes("//property");

..a.s.o. but nothing works. Evaluation of the var's show the Childnodes but there are not selected.

What did i wrong?

CodePudding user response：

The problem is that you have a namespace in your XML: <server xmlns="exampleServer">. When using XPath, it's assumed that elements have no namespace if you don't add a prefix in your path. See the answer to a related question.

In your situation you need to use an XmlNamespaceManager with your XPath and specify the namespace of the elements you are searching for:

var nsMgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable);
nsMgr.AddNamespace("es", "exampleServer");
        
var properties = root.SelectNodes("//es:system-properties/es:property", nsMgr);

See this fiddle for a test run.