How to use the special “xml” namespace prefix with XElement

Question

I'm using XElement to build an XML document in C# and I'm trying to set

<myEelment xml:space="preserve">

Here's my current attempt:

myElement.SetAttributeValue(XName.Get("space", "xml"), "preserve");

but it comes out like this:

<myEelment p4:space="preserve" xmlns:p4="xml">

I understand how this is going wrong - my code is using "xml" as a namespace URI when I want to use as a namespace prefix. My problem is that AFAICT the "xml" namespace prefix is somehow implicit and doesn't actually have a namespace URI associated with it. So how can I generate attributes with the namespace prefix "xml"?

Answer 1

Standard namespaces are available as properties on the XNamespace class. Use that.

var myElement = doc.Descendants("myElement").Single();
myElement.SetAttributeValue(XNamespace.Xml + "space", "preserve");