I'm trying to parse an Atom feed programmatically. I have the atom XML downloaded as a string. I can load the XML into an XmlDocument
. However, I can't traverse the document using XPath. Whenever I try, I get null
.
I've been using this Atom feed as a test: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Calling SelectSingleNode()
always returns null
, except for when I use "/
". Here is what I'm trying right now:
using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
{
string xml = wc.DownloadString("http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default");
XmlNamespaceManager nsMngr = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());
nsMngr.AddNamespace(string.Empty, "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom");
nsMngr.AddNamespace("app", "http://purl.org/atom/app#");
XmlDocument atom = new XmlDocument();
atom.LoadXml(xml);
XmlNode node = atom.SelectSingleNode("//entry/link/app:edited", nsMngr);
}
I thought it might have been because of my XPath, so I've also tried a simple query of the root node since I knew the root should work:
// I've tried both with & without the nsMngr declared above
XmlNode node = atom.SelectSingleNode("/feed");
No matter what I do, it seems like it can't select anything. Obviously I'm missing something, I just can't figure out what. What is it that I need to do in order to make XPath work on this Atom feed?
Although this question has an answer, I found out this question has an almost exact duplicate: SelectNodes not working on stackoverflow feed
While the C# implementation may allow default namespaces (I don't know), the XPath 1.0 spec doesn't. So, give "Atom" its own prefix:
nsMngr.AddNamespace("atom", "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom");
And change your XPath appropriately:
XmlNode node = atom.SelectSingleNode("//atom:entry/atom:link/app:edited", nsMngr);