XmlElement convert open tag to string c#

Question

I need to convert to string a subset of OuterXml content of a XmlElement as in the following example.

Imagine I have an XmlElement object representing the some-element tag

<some-element attribute="value">
    <inner-element>
        text content
    </inner-element>
</some-element>

What's the best approach to get a string that is just <some-element attribute="value"> ?

If possible, I'd prefer a solution without regular expressions involved, but using DOM classes

Answer 1

You can get the full XML of the element(which includes the close tag) by shallow cloning the node and then grabbing the outer XML of the node:

var xml = @"<some-element attribute=""value"">
     <inner-element>
         text content
      </inner-element>
    </some-element>";

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(xml);

MessageBox.Show(doc.DocumentElement.CloneNode(false).OuterXml);

I think after that point you will have to do some string manipulation to get exactly what you want, but that is relatively easy:

var outer = doc.DocumentElement.CloneNode(false).OuterXml;
var final = outer.Substring(0, outer.LastIndexOf(">", outer.Length - 2)+1);

MessageBox.Show(final);

Answer 2

I finally solved it by creating a temporary XElement instead using LINQ

IEnumerable<XAttribute> attributes = (from XmlAttribute xmlAttribute in node.Attributes select new XAttribute(xmlAttribute.Name, xmlAttribute.Value));

var xElement = new XElement(node.Name, attributes);

return xElement.ToString();