Develop Reference

How do I edit Node Values in an Xml File with C#

I am trying to change the values in a Farming simulator 22 savegame xml file from C# in visual studio. There are a lot of nodes so I have reduced them to make things easier. I want to know how to replace the value in the node using C# with out having to create and rebuild the xml file from scratch.
the path to the xml file is: (C:\Users\Name\Documents\My Games\FarmingSimulator2022\savegame1\careerSavegame.xml)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<careerSavegame revision="2" valid="true">
<settings>
<savegameName>My game save</savegameName>
<creationDate>2022-05-03</creationDate>
<mapId>MapFR</mapId>
<mapTitle>Haut-Beyleron</mapTitle>
<saveDateFormatted>2022-08-22</saveDateFormatted>
<saveDate>2022-08-22</saveDate>
<resetVehicles>false</resetVehicles>
</careerSavegame>

You can use the System.Xml.Linq namespace to access the xml file. This will load the file in the memory.
There is one class inside it, XDocument, that represents the xml document.
String filePath = "C:\Users\Name\Documents\My Games\FarmingSimulator2022\savegame1\careerSavegame.xml"
XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(filePath);
var element = xdoc.Elements("MyXmlElement").Single();
element.Value = "foo";
xdoc.Save("file.xml");
You can set the element variable as per the one which is needed to be replaced.

Through some research I found the solution to editing the values within the nodes. In this example I only change the value of savegameName, but it will be the same for the rest.
//Routing the xml file
XmlDocument xmlsettings = new XmlDocument();
xmlsettings.Load(#"D:\careerSavegame.xml");
//Setting values to nodes through innertext
String FarmNameSetting = "Martek Farm";
XmlNode savegameNamenode =
xmlsettings.SelectSingleNode
("careerSavegame/settings/savegameName");
savegameNamenode.InnerText = FarmNameSetting;

C# Parsing XML in ISO-8859-1

I'm working on a tool for validating XML files grabbed from a mainframe. For reasons beyond my control every XML file is encoded in ISO 8859-1.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO 8859-1"?>
My C# application utilizes the System.XML library to parse the XML and eventually a string of a message contained within one of the child nodes.
If I manually remove the XML encoding line it works just fine. But i'd like to find a solution that doesn't require manual intervention. Are there any elegant approaches to solving this? Thanks in advance.
The exception that is thrown reads as:
System.Xml.XmlException' occurred in System.Xml.dll. System does not support 'ISO 8859-1' encoding. Line 1, position 31
My code is
XMLDocument xmlDoc = new XMLDocument();
xmlDoc.Load(//fileLocation);

As Jeroen pointed out in a comment, the encoding should be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
not:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO 8859-1"?>
(missing dash -).
You can use a StreamReader with an explicit encoding to read the file anyway:
using (var reader = new StreamReader("//fileLocation", Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")))
{
var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.Load(reader);
// ...
}
(from answer by competent_tech in other thread I linked in an earlier comment).
If you do not want the using statement, I guess you can do:
var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml(File.ReadAllText("//fileLocation", Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")));
Instead of XmlDocument, you can use the XDocument class in the namespace System.Xml.Linq if you refer the assembly System.Xml.Linq.dll (since .NET 3.5). It has static methods like Load(Stream) and Parse(string) which you can use as above.

modifying pseudo-xml doc before it hits XmlDocument.Load

I have a series of... pseudo-xml files. What I mean by this, is they are almost XML files, but they are missing the xml declaration and a root node. e.g. conceptually it may look like this:
<a>info</a>
<b>info2</b>
What I want to do is load it into an XmlDocument object, e.g something similar to this:
XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
using (StreamReader file = new StreamReader(File.Open(#"file.txt", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)))
{
xml.Load(file);
}
This is throwing errors, most likely due to the ill formatted pseudo-xml file. I need to somehow handle adding in a root node before it hits the Load. I don't want to modify the actual file, or have to save anything to disk (e.g. a new temp file). I'm stuck on this, any suggestions?

XmlDocument has also a LoadXml() method that parses an Xml string. You can load your file content into a string, add the declaration and call LoadXml().
Of course, when you are using long files, this can be very memory consuming, pay attention to that.

you could try this
var xmlString = file.ReadToEnd();
xmlString = "<root>" + xmlString + "</root>";
xml.LoadXml(xmlString);

XML header missing after converting an XML file into a Binary Format File

I have a problem. I have an XML spreadsheet file that I'm trying to send via email. So I converted into a binary file and attached it to an email. The problem is when I'm trying to open it (on Excel), it's not showing the data that I saved. When I opened it like an XML file I realized that it didn't saved the XML header:
The way it should be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?mso-application progid="Excel.Sheet"?>
<Workbook xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet" xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
...
<Styles>
...
</Styles>
<Worksheet>
...
</Worksheet></Workbook>
after converting:
<Worksheet>
...
</Worksheet>
I've tried to use an xmldocument but i wasn't working, I also tried using a string, still not working. This is how I convert the XML to binary:
UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
binaryFile = encoding.GetBytes(xmlFile);
How can I fix this problem?
Thanks.

I think we need more information on how you're converting the XML file.
From your description it sounds like you've saved an Excel Spreadsheet to XML and for whatever reason you cannot just attach this text document to an email. My guess is you're using a method to attach the XML file that requires a byte array and can't just be provided a file location. If you could provide more information on this, it would help us figure out where things are going wrong for you.
The part I'm really stuck on is:
I've tried to use an xmldocument but i wasn't working, I also tried
using a string, still not working.
How did you try string? Did you read the file from disk using FileStream? If so, you should have been able to retrieve the full contents of the file.
Were you using XmlDocument the whole time and trying XmlDocument.OuterXml? This probably won't give you the control headers since they're not part of the XML body inside the root node.
So really there are two things I would have tried. First, if I had an XML file on disk and needed to attach it to an email through code and my only option was to provide a byte array, I'd do something like:
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream("", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
{
byte[] binaryFile = new byte[fs.Length];
fs.Read(binaryFile, 0, buff.LongLength);
//Copy the byte array to your email object.
}
Now if this isn't what you're doing, you'll need to provide a lot more detail on what you are starting with (file on disk?), what you need to do (send automated email?), what constraints you have and any other information that would limit potential solutions.

I've found my mistake: I didn't serialized the XML file so that's why after the conversion it just shows the data without the XML header. so there's 2 ways to resolve this problem:
first, we can concatenate the header with the data string, or we can use the serialize function. This is where I've found how to do it.

How to Verify using C# if a XML file is broken

Is there anything built in to determine if an XML file is valid. One way would be to read the entire content and verify if the string represents valid XML content. Even then, how to determine if string contains valid XML data.

Create an XmlReader around a StringReader with the XML and read through the reader:
using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(something))
while(reader.Read())
;
If you don't get any exceptions, the XML is well-formed.
Unlike XDocument or XmlDocument, this will not hold an entire DOM tree in memory, so it will run quickly even on extremely large XML files.

You can try to load the XML into XML document and catch the exception.
Here is the sample code:
var doc = new XmlDocument();
try {
doc.LoadXml(content);
} catch (XmlException e) {
// put code here that should be executed when the XML is not valid.
}
Hope it helps.

Have a look at this question:
How to check for valid xml in string input before calling .LoadXml()