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How to find descendants of a child element (LINQ to XML)

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This article shows how to use XPathEvaluate to find the descendant elements of a sequence of child elements, and how to use LINQ to XML query to find the same elements.

Example: Find all the Text descendant elements of all the Paragraph elements

This example extracts text from an XML representation of a simple word processing document. It first selects all Paragraph elements, ignoring the Comment element, and then it selects all the Text descendant elements of each Paragraph element. It does this task in two ways: with XPathEvaluate and with LINQ to XML query. It then compares the results and finds them identical.

The XPath expression is ./Paragraph//Text/text().

XElement root = XElement.Parse(
@"<Root>
  <Paragraph>
    <Text>This is the start of</Text>
  </Paragraph>
  <Comment>
    <Text>This comment isn't part of the paragraph text.</Text>
  </Comment>
  <Paragraph>
    <Annotation Emphasis='true'>
      <Text> a sentence.</Text>
    </Annotation>
  </Paragraph>
  <Paragraph>
    <Text>  This is the second sentence.</Text>
  </Paragraph>
</Root>");

// LINQ to XML query
string str1 =
    root
    .Elements("Paragraph")
    .Descendants("Text")
    .Select(s => s.Value)
    .Aggregate(
        new StringBuilder(),
        (s, i) => s.Append(i),
        s => s.ToString()
    );

// XPath expression
string str2 =
    ((IEnumerable)root.XPathEvaluate("./Paragraph//Text/text()"))
    .Cast<XText>()
    .Select(s => s.Value)
    .Aggregate(
        new StringBuilder(),
        (s, i) => s.Append(i),
        s => s.ToString()
    );

if (str1 == str2)
    Console.WriteLine("Results are identical");
else
    Console.WriteLine("Results differ");
Console.WriteLine(str2);

Dim root As XElement = _
    <Root>
        <Paragraph>
            <Text>This is the start of</Text>
        </Paragraph>
        <Comment>
            <Text>This comment isn't part of the paragraph text.</Text>
        </Comment>
        <Paragraph>
            <Annotation Emphasis='true'>
                <Text> a sentence.</Text>
            </Annotation>
        </Paragraph>
        <Paragraph>
            <Text>This is the second sentence.</Text>
        </Paragraph>
    </Root>

' LINQ to XML query
Dim str1 As String = _
    root.<Paragraph>...<Text>.Select(Function(ByVal s) s.Value). _
    Aggregate( _
        New StringBuilder(), _
        Function(ByVal s, ByVal i) s.Append(i), _
        Function(ByVal s) s.ToString())

' XPath expression
Dim str2 As String = DirectCast(root.XPathEvaluate("./Paragraph//Text/text()"), IEnumerable) _
    .Cast(Of XText)().Select(Function(ByVal s) s.Value) _
    .Aggregate( _
        New StringBuilder(), _
        Function(ByVal s, ByVal i) s.Append(i), _
        Function(ByVal s) s.ToString())

If str1 = str2 Then
    Console.WriteLine("Results are identical")
Else
    Console.WriteLine("Results differ")
End If
Console.WriteLine(str2)

This example produces the following output:

Results are identical
This is the start of a sentence.  This is the second sentence.

See also