Can I get an XPathNodeIterator directly from an XPath?
- by Val
I hope I'm just missing something obvious. I have a number of repeating nodes in an XML document:
<root>
<parent>
<child/>
<child/>
</parent>
</root>
I need to examine the contents of each of the <child> elements in turn, so I need an XPathNodeIterator containing the nodeset of all the <child> nodes.
If I have an XPath that would select the child nodes, e.g. /root/parent/child, is there any way to feed that directly to a new XPathNodeIterator? Everything I see in the docs and examples indicates I have to first get an XPathNavigator to the <parent>, then Select the child nodes, like:
XPathNavigator nav = datasource.CreateNavigator().SelectSingleNode( "/root/parent" );
XPathNodeIterator it = nav.Select( "./child" );
foreach ( child in it ) { /* do something */ }
I was hoping to skip the XPathNavigator, and intialize the XPathNodeIterator with XPath to the child nodes directly, something like:
XpathNodeIterator it = new XpathNodeIterator("/root/parent/child");
foreach ( child in it ) { /* do something */ }
Possible? The benefit is not only saving a line of code, but I can use a single XPath expression, rather than splitting the path to the <child> nodes in two, first to get the parent element, then to select its children.
