Simple XML Parser in C# using XmlDocument
In this article we will look at how to read a websites Sitemap.xml with C# and parse it's contents using a simple XML Parser.

By Tim Trott | C# ASP.Net MVC | September 14, 2009

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An XML Sitemap is a specially structured XML file which provides important structural information about a website to search engine crawlers for indexing purposes. The basic sitemap structure looks like this.

<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xsi:schemalocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
  <url>
    <loc>https://lonewolfonline.net/</loc>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2010-09-14</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://lonewolfonline.net/simple-xml-parser/</loc>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
    <lastmod>2009-09-14</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  </url>
</urlset>

Individual <url> tags are wrapped inside the containing <urlset> nodes. Each <url> represents a page on the site. Inside the <url> node, are four nodes.

The <loc> node represents the page URL.

The <priority> node represents the webmaster-defined site map priority.

The <lastmod> node represents the date on which the page was last modified.

The <changefreq> node indicates how often the page is updated and suggests to the search engine how often to crawl it again.

Code coder coding html xml web sourcecode — Simple XML Parser in C#

Writing a Simple XML Parser in C#

For this example, I am creating a small console application and outputting the results to the screen. I am also reading the sitemap from a file, but you can just as easily download files from a website instead.

You can also download a sample project from GitHub.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Xml;

namespace SitemapXMLParser
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            XmlDocument urldoc = new XmlDocument();
            urldoc.Load("Sitemap.xml");

            XmlNodeList xnList = urldoc.GetElementsByTagName("url");

            foreach (XmlNode node in xnList)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("url " + node["loc"].InnerText);
                Console.WriteLine("priority " + node["priority"].InnerText);
                Console.WriteLine("last modified " + node["lastmod"].InnerText);
                Console.WriteLine("change frequency " + node["changefreq"].InnerText);
                Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine);
            }
        }
    }
}