How to read a XML file

Question

I have the following XML structure for a card game. I want to load the card titels and descriptions into two arrays that I can use to randomize the cards.

    <Cards>
      <CardTitles>
        <Title>Some Title</Title>
                   .
                   .
                   .
                   .
                   .
     </CardTitles>
     <CardDesc>
       <Desc>Some description</Desc>
     </CardDesc>
    </Cards>

But no matter what I do or what code I write I'm unable to get the actual text from the proper tag. The closest I got was following this example :https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlreader.readsubtree(v=vs.110).aspx

I know I'm not supposed to ask for complete solutions but I'm just stumped. Any help in getting this matter cleared up to me will be great.

What exactly are you having issues with? There must be literally hundreds of examples and questions on this topic — Patrick, Mar 21 '16 at 15:30
@Patrick . There are but I just cant wrap my hear around them. All I want is to get the inner text of all Title tags for example into a string array. — Uri Popov, Mar 21 '16 at 15:32
Well if that is the *exact* xml structure you will probably get an error. You have an unclosed Title tag and dots in the middle of it. That's not valid... — Patrick, Mar 21 '16 at 15:48
@Patrick the dots are just to illustrate that there are more title tags than just he one X_X . — Uri Popov, Mar 21 '16 at 16:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 21 '16 at 16:19

1

Supposing that you have an xml file named sample.xml in C:\temp you can use LINQ To XML:

   XElement x = XElement.Load (@"c:\temp\Sample.xml");

   IEnumerable<string> titles = from title in x.Element("CardTitles").Elements()
                                select title.Value;
   IEnumerable<string> descriptions = from description in x.Element("CardDesc").Elements()
                                      select description.Value;

answered Mar 21 '16 at 16:19

V. Oikonomakos

119
1
5

ok. this seems like a really straight forward solution, Question is will this work with a unity3d project and will it run on both iOS and android ? – Uri Popov Mar 21 '16 at 16:57

TchiYuan · Answer 2 · 2016-03-21T15:48:50.330

Instead of going XmlReader route, you can use XmlSerializer which is much more simple and straightforward to use.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/58a18dwa(v=vs.110).aspx

You'd have something like this:

<Cards>
      <CardTitles>
        <Title>Some Title</Title>
     </CardTitles>
     <CardDesc>
       <Desc>Some description</Desc>
     </CardDesc>
</Cards>

.Net Classes

public class Cards {
    public CardTitles CardTitles;
    public CardDesc CardDesc;
}

public class CardTitles {
    public String Title;
} 

public class CardDesc {
    public String Desc;
}

And then use XmlSerializer.Deserialize method.

XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Cards));
StringReader inputStrReader = new StringReader(inputString);
Cards cards = (Cards)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(inputStrReader);

How to read a XML file

2 Answers2