Bee Eee Blog

Writing xml files in c# is fairly painless and straight forward. I’ll use XmlTextWriter in the following example.

using System.Xml;
string name = "Joe";
int age = 23;

// create writer
XmlTextWriter writer =
         new System.Xml.XmlTextWriter("test.xml", Encoding.UTF8);
writer.Indentation = 1;
writer.IndentChar = '\t';

// start the document
writer.WriteStartDocument(true);

// start an element
writer.WriteStartElement("templates");
writer.WriteAttributeString("version", "1.0.0.0");

// create a sub tag people
writer.WriteStartElement("people");

// create a sub tag person
writer.WriteStartElement("person");

// add the attribute age="23"
writer.WriteAttributeString("age",age.ToString());

// write out the full tag Joe
writer.WriteElementString("name",name);

// close out the person tag
writer.WriteEndElement();

// close out the people tag
writer.WriteEndElement();

// close the template tag
writer.WriteEndElement();

// end the document
writer.WriteEndDocument();

// close and write to file.
writer.Close();

Here is the resulting xml (formatting added)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<templates version="1.0.0.0">
  <people>
    <person age="23">
      <name>Joe</name>
    </person>
  </people>
</templates>

As I said writing xml is a piece of cake. Parsing on the other hand… I’ll keep you posted.