dirtyDogStink

how2: Convert an Xml Document to a string with C#

Friday, February 18 2005

As part of my current project, I am taking an Xml document and inserting it into a text field in a SQL 2000 database.  I found the few lines of code I needed (here), but thought I'd add them here too for reference purposes.

As stated in the link above, "this is kind of a handy utility because when you call ToString method on XmlDocument object, it does not return you its contents but it returns the full class name System.Xml.XmlDocument."

When called by another method, the method below will return the string for you to manipulate.

<------------<start code here>

1. static string GetXmlString(string strFile)
2. {
3.         // Load the xml file into XmlDocument object.
4.         XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
5.         try
6.         {
7.                 xmlDoc.Load(strFile);
8.         }
9.         catch (XmlException e)
10.         {
11.                 Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
12.         }
13.         // Now create StringWriter object to get data from xml document.
14.         StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
15.         XmlTextWriter xw = new XmlTextWriter(sw);
16.         xmlDoc.WriteTo(xw);
17.         return sw.ToString();
18. }