How to retrieve specific openXML element Word document by element path

Question

I have element path in openXML format like:

/w:document[1]/w:body[1]/w:p[1]

I need to get this element as OpenXmlElement from WordprocessingDocument

Something like this:

public OpenXmlElement GetElementByPath(WordprocessingDocument doc, string path)
{
    // Some Logic

    return element;
}

Someone, please help

Answer 1

With XPath query (very similar to what you already wrote).

Load the file with XmlDocument and get instance of XPathNavigator from the Document (root) node.

Here is example from my code:

   using System.Xml;
    using System.Xml.Linq;
    using System.Xml.XPath;

public static List<XmlNode> queryXPath(this IXPathNavigable source, String xPath, XmlNamespaceManager nsManager = null)
    {
        XPathNavigator xNav = source.CreateNavigator();
        if (nsManager == null) nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xNav.NameTable);
        List<XmlNode> output = new List<XmlNode>();
        XPathExpression xExp = XPathExpression.Compile(xPath, nsManager);
        XPathNodeIterator xIterator = xNav.Select(xExp);
        while (xIterator.MoveNext())
        {
            XmlNode tmp = xIterator.Current.UnderlyingObject as XmlNode;

            output.Add(tmp);
        }
        return output;
    }