Avoid xml escaping of angle brackets, when passing xml string to System.Xml.Linq.XElement

Question

I'm getting a string from string GetXmlString(); this I cant change.

I have to append this to an xml within a new XElement ("parent" , ... ); , to the ... area.

This string I'm getting is of the following format.

<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
...

The final result I want is this to be like

<parent>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
<tag name="" value =""></tag>
...
</parent>

when I just pass the string as XElement("root", GetXmlString()) < and > are encoded to < and &gt

When I try XElement.Parse(GetXmlString()) or XDocument.Parse(GetXmlString()) I get the There are multiple root elements exception.

How do I get the required output without escaping the brackets? What am I missing?

Answer 1

The simplest option is probably to give it a root element, then parse it as XML:

var doc = XDocument.Parse("<parent>" + text + "</parent>");

If you need to append to an existing element, you can use:

var elements = XElement.Parse("<parent>" + text + "</parent>").Elements();
existingElement.Add(elements);

Answer 2

An alternative to Jon's suggestion would be to create an XmlReader for your fragment and parse from that:

var element = new XElement("parent");

var settings = new XmlReaderSettings
{
    ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Fragment
};

var text = GetXmlString();

using (var sr = new StringReader(text))
using (var xr = XmlReader.Create(sr, settings))
{
    xr.MoveToContent();

    while (!xr.EOF)
    {
        var node = XNode.ReadFrom(xr);   
        element.Add(node);
    }
}

This would be useful if the 'parent' element already exists, else simple concatenation of the XML nodes at each end and parsing would be simpler.